Müller, Seraina and Aldina Camenisch

Re-negotiating Switzerland from Abroad: An Ethnographic Perspective on Citizenship-Belonging Nexuses
2019

This chapter analyses how Swiss migrants in Mainland China and Northern Europe perceive and rediscover Switzerland in their transnational lives. We are interested in how negotiations of belonging and citizenship practices intersect and interact over time and distance. Based on an ethnographic and inductive approach, we situate the daily-life experiences of these rather privileged migrants contextually and theoretically. As we will argue, they have to be understood in the context of an increasingly mobile and diversifying world shaped by macro-level constellations of political and economic power. Our findings thus point to theoretical issues that have hitherto remained undertheorised in citizenship and migration scholarship.