Ongoing Mobility Trajectories ― Lived Experiences of Global Migration

This book explores the complex category of the ‘skilled migrant’. Developing the more nuanced concept of the ‘mobile settler’, the research shows how becoming a skilled migrant is not just a political and economic determination of knowledge and human capital but a complex negotiation of contexts – immigration contexts and conditions, social locations, qualifications and skills, as well as personal ties. Belying the simple binaries of official visa categories (e.g. student/worker, skilled/unskilled and temporary/permanent), these diverse contexts of migrant experience are central to the ways migrants construct their personal histories and negotiate their shifting attachments to home and belonging. By highlighting how migrants imagine their own identities and pathways, this book extends the agent-centred approaches to global mobility and transnationalism that have emerged in cultural studies and social and cultural geography in recent years, affording greater recognition to the individualised, local and lived experiences of global migration and thus engaging more deeply with global concerns about increased mobility and the challenges it represents.

Rosie Roberts is a teacher and cultural researcher in the School of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. Using processes of life storytelling and narrative inquiry, her work focuses on transnational mobilities into and out of Australia and the lived experiences of migrants as they negotiate embodied, material and imaginative forms of re-settlement and belonging. Her research also explores the ways migrants use tactics to negotiate risk under the spatial and temporal conditions of visa categories, which often produce multi-stage and ongoing migration trajectories (i.e. as people move within and between categories such as humanitarian entrant, international students, temporary labour migrant, working holiday maker and family migrant).