Migration, class and the intergenerational self in contemporary Australia: exploring family legacies

Recent sociological scholarship in the United Kingdom deploys the concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ to think about class misidentification in the context of upward social mobility. In this article, we argue that the concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ proves especially fruitful when deployed to think about personal migration histories. We draw on our recent study of cross-class relationships in Australia to argue that in the context of spatial mobilities scholarly attention should be focused on the intergenerational transmission of class and the complexities of its subjective and affective inheritance under new conditions. In the process, we engage the concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ to new ends, exploring the ways our research participants gestured to, grappled with and strived to honour family legacies. In this article, we delve into three research participants’ class-origin stories from our 38 in-depth interviews. These selected life stories pivot around migration, the legacies of family class positions, and the forces of racialisation and racism in the transmission and transformation of class capital and identity in Australia. We explore our interviewees’ efforts to remember and respect their parents’ and grandparents’ complex realities and struggles within their own narratives about class identification. The ‘intergenerational self’ thus helps us understand the way our research participants faced the class contradictions, misrecognition and opportunities that migration and racialisation had afforded, ultimately highlighting the significance of familial class legacies within class identities.