Negotiating Mobility: Sociocultural Grammars of Albanian Irregularised Kurbet-Migration to the United Kingdom
Negotiating Mobility: Sociocultural Grammars of Albanian Irregularised Kurbet-Migration to the United Kingdom

Summary/Abstract: Irregularised migration from Albania to the United Kingdom emerges as a governance-produced status, negotiated through socioculturally mediated practices, rather than as a criminal propensity. Drawing on digital-historical ethnography with Albanian migrants who entered the UK via irregularised routes (2015-2020) and a Bourdieusian relational approach, this article explores how emic grammars of kurbet (obligatory sacrifice), kanun (reputational ordering) and besa (commitments of trust) shape the interpretation and moral evaluation of mobility. Through repeated enactment, these grammars sediment as dispositions within a mobile habitus (endurance, reputational vigilance, reciprocity expectations) and mobilise resources (trust guarantees, route knowledge, embodied resilience) that become capital only when recognised as valuable within specific fields (kinship, diaspora, brokerage, algorithmic field). Yet, within UK border-labour regimes, often mediated through intermediaries, the same resources are misrecognised as illegality or commodified as priced intermediation, producing ambivalent effects that normalise risk and recalibrate moral obligations. The article contributes a relational theory-of-practice account that links irregularisation to field-specific regimes of recognition and valuation.

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