Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration

✍ Scribed by Simone Varriale

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 205
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book rethinks meritocracy as a form of coloniality, namely, a social imaginary that reproduces narratives of ethnic and racial difference between European centres and peripheries, and between Europe and its others. Drawing on interviews with working and middle class, white and Black Italians who moved to Britain after the 2008 economic crisis, the book explores the narratives of Northern meritocracy and Southern backwardness that inform migrants' motivations for moving abroad, and how these narratives are experienced within classed, racialised and gendered migrations. Connecting decolonial theory with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this book provides innovative insights into the relationships between meritocracy, coloniality and European whiteness, and into the social stratification of EU migrations.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration
Copyright information
Table of Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Meritocracy beyond the Anglosphere
Meritocracy, coloniality and postcolonial sociology
Meritocracy, coloniality and the European peripheries
Meritocracy, coloniality and unequal EU migrations
Researching unequal migrations: methodological preliminaries
Structure of the book
1 The Coloniality of Meritocracy: From the Anglosphere to Post-Austerity Europe
Conceptualizing meritocracy
Meritocracy, stigma, racialization
Lived experiences of meritocracy
From meritocracy to coloniality
Unequal Europes and the coloniality of Italy
Italy as a Southern sinner: post-1990s and post-austerity narratives
Meritocracy/coloniality: a synergy between decolonial theory and Bourdieu
Meritocracy/coloniality as doxa
Meritocracy/coloniality as category of practice
Meritocracy/coloniality and belonging
Conclusion
2 Imagining Meritocracy in Unequal Positions
Meritocratic imaginaries, intra-EU migration and post-2008 Italian emigration
Youth (working-class) migration as a space of self-exploration
A gendered and racialized field of forces
Unequal graduates: between fear of falling and structural privilege
Lack of control: later working-class migrations
Conclusion
3 (Re)Imagining Meritocracy in Unequal Migrations
Adjusting meritocracy: Gabriella and the gendering of transnational cultural capital
Meritocracy as self-fulfilling prophecy: Corrado and the gendering of transnational cultural capital
“Sometimes I feel ungrateful”: Elena and the epistemic limits of meritocracy
Meritocracy as “feeling like anyone else”: the racialized trajectories of Oliver and Eliza
Dissonant meritocracy: the classed upward mobility of Grazia
“Everything is precarious here”: the classed immobility of Maria
Conclusion
4 The Coloniality of Belonging
Meritocracy, coloniality and belonging
Becoming Italian in England
Credentialized (middle-class) belonging
Individualized and ethnicized (working-class) belonging
The epistemic limits of credentialized belonging
The epistemic limits of individualized and ethnicized belonging
Conclusion
5 The Coloniality of Brexit
Still a meritocracy? Brexit, belonging and coloniality among EU migrants
Meritocratic Brexit
Cosmopolitan (working-class) Brexit
Credentialized (middle-class) Brexit
Beyond Brexit: middle-class racial grammars
Conclusion
Conclusion
Trajectories, capitals, fields
Categories of practice
Positionality, interviewing and recruitment
Social class
‘Race’
Regional background, gender and age
Motivations for migration
Educational and work trajectories (after migration)
Educational and work trajectories (before migration)
Life in the UK
Future
Post-2008 migration
Being an ‘immigrant’
Brexit
Parents’ education and employment
Appendix A: Interviewing: From Theory to Practice
Appendix B: Sample Composition
Appendix C: Summary of Participants
Appendix D: Interview Topics and Questions
Trajectories, capitals, fields
Categories of practice
Positionality, interviewing and recruitment
Social class
‘Race’
Regional background, gender and age
Motivations for migration
Educational and work trajectories (after migration)
Educational and work trajectories (before migration)
Life in the UK
Future
Post-2008 migration
Being an ‘immigrant’
Brexit
Parents’ education and employment
References
Index