Infrastructures of migration and the ordering of privilege in mobility

Abstract

This article explores privilege in migration. Rather than focus on practices of privilege at micro-scales, the article examines how privilege in migration is ordered and disciplined through meso- and macro-level infrastructures (transnational organisations, higher education institutes, and governmental visa policies). The article questions where a pervasive discourse of mobility as achievement comes from and how it becomes materialised in the promotion and facilitation of forms of mobility. It argues that privilege in mobility becomes disciplined through neoliberal discourses of globalisation that idealise mobility as cosmopolitanism, whilst simultaneously producing this as an elite subject positioning.