Mobility and belonging are among the most decisive yet unevenly distributed forces shaping contemporary social life. In late modern societies, mobility is widely framed as a universal good: a source of opportunity, autonomy, and self-realization. Belonging, by contrast, is increasingly relegated to the private or symbolic sphere, valued emotionally but deprived of structural centrality. This imbalance has given rise to social formations in which individuals may move extensively across educational, professional, and geographic spaces while remaining weakly embedded in durable communities. At the same time, other social contexts continue to reproduce dense forms of belonging at the cost of limited mobility, generating social continuity alongside economic and symbolic immobility.
Darya Spiridonov (Wed,) studied this question.