Mobilities, locality and place-making: understanding categories of (non-)membership in a peripheral valley

This article employs a mobility lens to investigate the ways in which membership is organised in a peripheral(ised) place. We show that adopting such a lens makes it possible to tackle important pitfalls in migration studies – an urban and sedentary bias and national- and ethnicity-based epistemologies. By including different types of transnational, national and local mobilities and applying a unit of analysis that comprises all people who live in or pass through the place under study – rather than only a particular ethnic or national group – we are able to identify the processes in which (im)mobilities are entangled with each other and their relationship with local processes of community formation. Based on ethnographic research in a Swiss valley, our study depicts a scheme of ordering (non-)membership that we refer to as the imagined community of fate of the Valley-ers. The latter can be understood as ‘emplaced peripheralisation’ that is the outcome of a dynamic and nested form of boundary work in which the most important categories and markers are socio-economic – rather than nation- and ethnicity-based. Our results demonstrate the importance of de-centring the role of migration and the city when it comes to understanding the social organisation of difference at particular places.