Tania Zittoun and Janine Dahinden

Small Localities at the Peripheries of Europe: Transnational Mobilities, Diversification and Multi-Scalar
Place-Making

Project Summary

Moving beyond a focus on urban centers, in this project we look at how diverse forms of mobility generate social diversity, and how, in turn, these participate in social transformation. We study these questions at the scale of small localities – villages, conglomerations of villages, or valleys – on the outskirts of Europe, including their entire population (mobile as well as non-mobile). We investigate all forms of mobilities coexisting in one small locality (internal out- and immigration, tourism, old-age-retired expats, sedentary and commuters, international migrants, mobile business people, refugees).

We examine how these types of dynamics – transnational, in terms of boundary work, and in terms of individual live trajectories – enable, constrain, guide, or open new possibilities for each other. We develop an integrative theoretical model to understand new facets of the Migration-Mobility Nexus and current globalizing forces. To develop a comparative analysis, we conduct three case studies in Switzerland, Malta, and Denmark.

Scientific Poster 2022 (PDF)

Key Findings:

  • Circumstances shape im/mobilities: being at ‘periphery of the periphery’ impacts the relations between localities, imaginations and boundaries, and informs the constellations of im/mobilities present in the localities examined.
  • Exploring how diverse im/mobilities become entangled, localized, and attain meaning in localities – without recursing to given categories – can be achieved through abductively defining the ‘where’ and the ‘who’.
  • Socio-economic marginalization in the Val-de-Travers produces an ‘imagined community of fate’, which unfolds at the interface between im/mobility and locality; the most important categories and markers are socio-economic rather than ethno-national.
  • Some cross-border mobilities are perceived as damaging to the social and economic well-being by some borderlanders; this produces (im)moral mobilities – immoralized individuals who are stigmatized, as well as moralized persons who feel they belong to a collective.

Project-related scientific publications