Thinking citizenship through lived experiences of highly skilled migrants in Budapest

Abstract

This study aims to understand and explain the concept of citizenship by analyzing the lived experiences of highly skilled migrants reflecting on their everyday transnational lives in the urban setting of Budapest. Based on the discourse analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews conducted in Budapest in the Fall of 2022, the study thinks through lived citizenship experiences to understand how and why these experiences matter for the formation of subjective citizenship understanding. This study suggests that the concept of lived citizenship embodies a complex narrative of everyday socio-economic, socio-cultural, and emotional experiences that go beyond what the legal status depicts. Citizenship experiences of highly skilled migrants present a process of negotiating cultural and moral cosmopolitanism with constructive patriotism in everyday lives in the urban context. The study advances the thinking on the foundation, manifestations, and operationalization of lived citizenship as experiences of belonging and coexistence, presenting a unique contribution to the production of knowledge on highly skilled migration in Hungary. This article proposes that citizenship entails a complex relational dimension and includes a life-long learning process with continual meaning-making through life experiences that transcends the consequences of the legal status within a given nation-state.