Up from the archive: Conceptualising the Ambivalence and Complexity of Migrant Belonging. Natalie Calleja thinks with
In this article I reflect on the salient theoretical contribution Greg Noble made to the field of sociology in his 2013 paper entitled ‘“It is home but it is not home”: Habitus, field and the migrant’. I reflect on the pertinence of Noble's commitment to grappling with conceptual tensions to capture migrants’ social experiences in the multifaceted social worlds they belong to through his development of Bourdieu's notion of habitus and reconceptualisation of the notion of field . I examine the theoretical complexity Noble's paper extends to conceptualising migrant belonging as ambivalent, pedagogical, and contingent on the plurality of social worlds they inhabit. Thinking with Noble and drawing on theoretical threads from my doctoral project that are attentive to the politics of belonging and complexity of place, I reflect on the importance of developing place-attentive conceptual frames to capture varying and disparate modes of (non-)belonging experienced by bodies in place.
Authors
- Natalie Calleja (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7160-2920)
Institutions
- The University of Melbourne (AU)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Journal of sociology
- Published
- 2025-12-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833251391827
- Primary Topic
- Diaspora, migration, transnational identity
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00