A person can be treated as a migrant even if they have never crossed a border—simply because of their race and class. This research tackles a blind spot in how we understand who gets labelled a “migrant” and why. Current scholarship recognises that racialisation drives this process, but often assumes that class privilege protects racially minoritised people from discrimination. The researcher’s PhD work shows this is false: Western qualifications, language skills, and professional experience are routinely dismissed when held by racially minoritised individuals, triggering their framing as outsiders. Crucially, this extends to mixed-race and racially minoritised citizens who have lived their whole lives in Western countries. If this work reaches policymakers and practitioners, it could reshape how equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives operate—particularly in accredited professions like education, law, and medicine. The fellowship will produce academic articles, a book, and a policy brief, and will build the researcher’s capacity to lead a future project on retention of racially minoritised professionals. The research is fundamentally about social processes, not technical systems, but its implications for antiracism and social justice are direct and practical.
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The figure of the “migrant” is a deeply politicised one. Some mobilities are problematised and increasingly criminalised, whilst others are seen as unremarkable, even celebrated, and not framed as migrations. Migratisation, or the construction of some people – and not others – as migrant outsiders, is a social process. In other words, migrants are not born, but made. Scholarship on migratisation has come to recognise the significant role played by racialisation in this process. At the same time, there is still a tendency to assume that those who are racially minoritised are equally disadvantaged in economic terms, or that racially minoritised individuals of relative class privilege are free from discrimination. My PhD research shows that the effects of class privilege do not cancel out those of racial minoritisation, and that race and class are co-constitutive in processes of migratisation. My PhD thesis shows that cultural capitals such as Western educational qualifications, ability in Western languages, professional experience and other competencies are often contested when they are held by those who are racially minoritised. Based on analysis of longitudinal biographical narrative interviews with racially minoritised privileged migrants incorporating music elicitation, I show that refusals to recognise the legitimacy of such capitals can trigger migratisation, or the framing of the capitals’ owners as out of place and belonging elsewhere. Crucially, the intersections of race and class in processes of migratisation mean that a person can be treated as a migrant whether or not they have actually moved. This extends to racially minoritised and mixed-race citizens of Western states, where they may have lived all their lives. My PhD thus draws out the shared struggles between "migrants" and "citizens" alike, underscoring the urgent need for collective commitments to antiracism and social justice across civil society. In this fellowship, I will disseminate the contributions of my PhD thesis widely, to both academic and non-academic audiences. I will produce high-quality articles for reputable academic journals, present my findings at key sociological conferences internationally, develop a book proposal based on my PhD research and work towards a draft of the monograph. I will engage policymakers and non-academic users of my research by partnering with PublicPolicy@Southampton, a centre which specialises in connecting academics with policymakers and non-academic stakeholders. I will conduct stakeholder analysis, produce a policy brief and organise a workshop to communicate my findings to practitioners with a remit for social mobility, equality, diversity and inclusion. This fellowship will also build my research capacity. I will pursue training in research leadership, project management and grant writing. Based on this training, I will develop funding proposals for my next research project on the retention and progression of racially minoritised and mixed-race individuals in accredited professions such as education, law and medicine. I will conduct limited further research as part of a pilot study for this project. Lastly, I will broaden my teaching experience by engaging in teaching activities within the department. Through this fellowship programme of work, I will develop myself as an academic researcher.
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