Ethnic Identity, Social Mobility and the Role of Soulmates
Based on a study among higher-educated adult children of lower-class Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, this open access book explores processes of identification among social climbers with ethnic minority backgrounds. Using both survey data and open interviews with these ‘minority climbers’, the study details the contextual and temporal nature of identification. The results illustrate how ethnicity is contextual but have tangible and inescapable effects at the same time. Also the findings call for a more reflexive use of terms like ethnic ingroup/outgroup and bonding/bridging. Overall, the book helps us understand the emergence of middle-class segments that articulate their minority identities and as such it will be of great interest to academics, policy makers and all those interested in processes of integration and/or diversity.
Encounters and Practices of Petty Trade in Northern Europe, 1820–1960 : Forgotten Livelihoods
Uncovers one important, yet forgotten, form of itinerant livelihoods, namely petty trade, more specifically how it was practiced in Northern Europe during the period 1820–1960. It investigates how traders and customers interacted in different spaces and approaches ambulatory trade as an arena of encounters by looking at everyday social practices. Petty traders often belonged to subjugated social groups, like ethnic minorities and migrants, whereas their customers belonged to the resident population. How were these mobile traders perceived and described? What goods did they peddle? How did these commodities enable and shape trading encounters? What kind of narratives can be found, and whose? These questions pertaining to daily practices on a grass-root level have not been addressed in previous research.

