PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 2- Conceptual frameworkWodak 2007). Also, belonging is intertwined with the idea of identity not only becausemodes of belonging denote feelings of being recognised, understood and accepted(Savage et al. 2005), but because, as Yuval-Davis (2006) argues, ‗identity as transition[is] always producing itself through the combined processes of being and becoming,belonging and longing to belong‘, belonging can also capture emotional dimensions ofidentity (Bell 1999; Croucher 2004; Hedetoft and Hjort 2001). Moreover, as people‘sfeeling of belonging to a place or of being in place are often shaped by their experiencesof interactions with place, it also makes clear that belonging has important geographicdimensions, so becoming a theme for geographers to explore (Mee and Wright 2009).Such an understanding of belonging suggests that it is a distinct approach to studytransnational migration. This is not only because it can capture migrant people‘semotional aspects of longing for a more rooted belonging in the context of theirmobility (Ahmed et al. 2003; Rapport and Dawson 1998), but also because the conceptalso allows geographic research to engage in migration studies through incorporatingthe concept of identity into understanding migrants‘ emotional process and constitutionof belonging.Migrants‘ emotional experiences of belonging are considered to be constituted by anumber of factors, one of which is the local institutional and social environment. Forexample, studies have shown that citizenship is an important mechanism that allowsmigrants to secure a national sense of belonging through granting them rights andprivileges (Croucher 2004; Ehrkamp and Leitner 2005; Gullette 2006). However, giventhat the concept of citizenship also implies boundary-delimiting and filing mechanisms(Joppke 1999; Preston et al. 2006), migrants‘ experiences of securing citizenship as away to forge a national sense of belonging are often integrated into particular political36