PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 2- Conceptual frameworkSuch understanding of migrants‘ experiences of forging a sense of (being in) placeforegrounds the significance of migrants‘ identities in this process. As Levitt andGlick-Schiller (2004) argue, belonging can only be constituted by combining bothindividual practices and identities. In the same vein, others have argued that people‘sfeeling of being-in-place cannot be captured without taking into consideration theirfeelings toward an identity with a place (see, for example, Cuba and Hummon 1993,Rose 1995). Place identity, as Rose (1995) suggests, can be forged through people‘spractices of necessitating boundaries to create a kind of ‗us‘ milieu in which one canperform his/her identities and feel accepted and understood. This perspective has beenelaborated by scholarly interest drawn to people‘s employment of various strategies todefine a given space and carry out their spatial practices, such as the house rules inhome-making practices (Constable 2003, Cox and Narula 2003, Law 2001), to makeothers‘ experiences fit into the implicit frame of reference (Keith and Pile 1993). It isworth noting that practices of boundary-delimiting which are integral to people‘sinteractions with different social actors are inevitably conditioned and shaped by theirstereotypical understandings of those perceived as others (Holloway 2001).Highlighting the ways in which migrants‘ identities inform and mediate their feelingsand practices of belonging also requires consideration of the multiplicity of migrants‘identities as a result of contemporary transnational interconnections. Althoughcontemporary mobile people‘s experiences of frequent border-crossing movements andlinks have challenged various forms of territorialised identities and contributed to theformation of transnational or even cosmopolitan consciousness and identity (GlickSchiller 1999; Hannerz 1996; Mahler 2003; Vertovec 1999, 2001), they never preventmigrants from grounding place attachment and place identities. As Ehrkamp‘s (2005)study has shown, transnational activities and connections assist in reproducing migrants‘51