Middle-class locations: emplacements and displacements of habitus among the French in London

This article examines the alterations of habitus that lead to feelings of emplacement and displacement among middle-class French citizens living in London. I broaden Bourdieu’s concept of split habitus, developed primarily in the context of social mobility, and extend it to questions of geographic mobility. I characterize the French in London as “sideways migrants” who move to a nearby nation with comparable socio-economic indicators and global standing, seeking to maintain their middle-class status through transversal mobility. They are “nation straddlers” who experience dislocations of habitus shaped in the French national social space after relocating to London. I present the cases of four French women in London, drawing upon a larger longitudinal ethnographic study, to expand understandings of how migrant aspirations and practices are connected to the positionality of habitus in both the social space of the nation of origin and that of resettlement. Migration research that situates migrants in national social spaces that they straddle, as in the case of sideways migrants, has important implications for broader questions about the durability and nature of both class and national identity in the contemporary world.