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Paper short abstract

Migration is increasingly understood as an ordinary condition of post-migration societies. Drawing on multimodal ethnography with long-term migrants to the UK, this paper examines how personal belongings mediate affect, belonging, and everyday practices of settlement beyond crisis-oriented framings.

Paper long abstract

Research on migration increasingly adopts a ‘post-migration’ framework that conceptualises migration as an ordinary and constitutive feature of contemporary societies in the global North, shaped by long histories of colonialism and labour mobility (Moslund 2015). From this perspective, migrant identities in migrant-built societies no longer align with public categorisations that separate ‘migrants’ from ‘citizens’ (Favell 2022), which inadequately capture lived experiences of transnationalism in these societies. My proposed paper contributes to this approach by presenting preliminary findings from a multimodal ethnography conducted with long-term migrants to the UK, focusing on the material culture of international mobility. Specifically, I examine what people pack when they move across borders and the emotional and affective role these items play as part of migratory journeys? I argue that this object-centred approach offers new distinctive entry points into exploring belonging, settlement, and integration in 'post-migration' contexts. I will show how participants continually reworked notions of home, integration, and settlement through materially entangled affective labour and embodied practices, as part of their everyday social reproduction at the intersection of private and public life. The findings will demonstrate the constitutive role material culture plays in both sustaining and reproducing migrants’ identities and sense of belonging across multiple places. By empirically grounding conceptual debates on ‘integration’ and ‘settlement’, the paper aims to diffuse the crisis-oriented and value-laden framings of migration (Squire et al. 2021). Instead, I foreground migration as an ordinary affective and emotional condition, offering a materially-grounded rethinking of belonging in post-migration societies.