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ABSTRACT
German poet Rilke observed that ‘life is lived in transformation’ but that ‘the only journey is the one within’. These reflections on the everyday, lived experience of change, mobility and identity (trans)formation offer an interesting counterpoint to Stephen Castles’ meso and macro level analyses of migration and social transformation. Using data from life narrative interviews, this paper seeks to understand the relationship between identity formation and mobility, through the lens of some of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks identified in Castles’ highly influential body of work. It asks to what extent the nation-state represents the limit to the parameters of identity formation, how such limitations are generated and perpetuated and what are the prospects for future identity transformations.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Associate Professor Farida Fozdar is a sociologist working within UWA’s discipline of Anthropology and Sociology. She has published extensively on migrant and refugee settlement and integration, racism/antiracism, nationalism and social exclusion. Her latest work focusses on postnationalism and cosmopolitanism, and on mixed race.
Notes
1. Australian Research Council Future Fellowship FT100100432.
2. Others focussed on identity categories completely unrelated to nations or ethnicities, such as becoming a Goth, or recognising their homosexuality, as key transformational experiences. Thus, particular subjectivities were complex, reflexive and not necessarily oriented to mobility or the nation, or to transformation, for that matter.
3. Castles (Citation2010) is in fact critical of the ‘only 3 per cent of the population’ argument, noting it ignores internal movements, and the fact that some countries and urban areas, in particular, have much higher rates.