Living on the Move: Mobility, Religion and Exclusion of Eastern European Migrants in Rural Scotland

ABSTRACT

The paper explores theoretical and practical issues related to spiritual mobility and engagement with Eastern European migrants in rural Scotland. Emerging mobile lifestyles create different patterns of living ‘on the move’, but the church and other rural institutions in Scotland often fail to attend to migrants' affective relationships with existing immigrant communities, unpredictable travelling behaviour, and cross-border spiritual links. For this gap to be addressed, the paper develops a complex understanding of migrants living on the move. It suggests adding a spiritual element to the analysis of transnational mobilities and explores the ways in which constellations of mobility and religion generate more-than-corporeal dislocations (faith-based sensations), generate virtual movement (beyond rationality to the outside of knowing), and create new imaginations of the migrants' place in the world. It argues that the spiritual can be seen as an important factor in producing new social worlds and overcoming the separations and division created by migrations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.