Mobility Citizenship Migration, Identity and Nationality in a Restructuring Europe

This book aims to trace the development of a new conception of ‘mobility citizenship’ in Europe historically, demographically and experientially. To this aim, it adopts a ‘constellationist’ approach applied to the intra-European mobility space and uses the case studies of Hungarian and Romanian migration to the United Kingdom to develop a multidimensional meso-level comparative empirical analysis of mobility-citizenship constellations. The main theoretical proposition of the book is that citizenship has undergone a noticeable change in meaning and valuation, with mobility rights becoming a more central component in the structure of opportunities it provides citizens. The logic of ‘mobility citizenship’ is thus changing long-held perceptions around the social functions of citizenship, and consequently, the nature of contemporary transnational society. The multifaceted analysis presented in the book will appeal to readers with backgrounds in various disciplines such as political sociology, migration studies, citizenship studies, nationalism studies, or European studies.

Chapter 1.- Introduction: the constellationist imagination.- Chapter 2.- Transnational citizenship constellations.- Chapter 3.- European mobility constellations.- Chapter 4.- Open borders and free movement: experiencing and evaluating mobility citizenship.- Chapter 5.- The moral political economy of extraterritorial citizenship.- Chapter 6.- Citizenship in transit: patterns and narratives of naturalisation in Britain.- Chapter 7.- Conclusions: mobility citizenship constellations.

Chris Moreh is Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. His main research interests focus on the political sociology of migration, citizenship, ethnicity, nationalism and urban heritage. His approach to research is interdisciplinary and multimethodological, having combined intensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing, qualitative text and documentary analysis, and statistical modeling in his work. He is the author of Alcalái románok: migráció és társadalmi differenciálódás [Romanians of Alcalá: Migration and social differentiation] (2014), as well as various journal articles. He is currently working on an edited volume on Brexit and Migration and a textbook on quantitative sociological methodology that takes a unique approach in combining computational techniques and empirical applications to researching social trust, based on a British Academy and Leverhulme Trust funded project to develop a Trust Research Methodology Database.