The Modern Migrant

What happens when the judgement you are preparing for comes from people who are no longer in the room?

In this episode of The Modern Migrant, Katrina Borissova Frank explores the rehearsal: the quiet, constant work of adjusting yourself before you speak. The message rewritten four times, the reference dropped mid-sentence, the phone voice, the eight seconds of silence before you speak in a meeting, which the room reads as caution and which is actually translation.

Moving from lived experience to sociology and cultural theory, this episode explores:

• Why moving between worlds is wider than migration: class, region, language, profession, and being the only person in the room who looks like you

• The difference between feedback and prediction: reading a room is a human skill, but the rehearsal runs before the room has given you anything to respond to

• Charles Horton Cooley's looking-glass self, and why what moves us is never the reflection itself but the judgement we imagine behind it

• What happens when you live with more than one mirror: the room you are trying to enter reads you for how far you still are from it, while the room you came from reads you for how far you have gone

• Erving Goffman's front stage and backstage, his distinction between visible and invisible difference, and the question of where, exactly, your backstage is

• How the "correct" way to sound was assembled by people with names, from the Académie française in 1635 to the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English in 1926

• Stuart Hall's idea of identity as a production, never complete and always in process, and what that does to the search for the "real" self

The rehearsal does not stay in one room. It travels into meetings, emails, family gatherings and phone calls, until it runs whether or not anybody is watching.

The way out is not to stop rehearsing. It is to ask who is on the panel, and whether they ever had the standing to judge you.

References:

Charles Horton Cooley: the looking-glass self and imputed judgement

• Human Nature and the Social Order (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902): the looking-glass self and its three principal elements

Erving Goffman: front and back regions, the discredited and the discreditable, covering

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956; expanded edition, New York, Anchor Books, 1959): impression management, front stage and backstage

• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1963): visible and invisible difference, passing and covering

Stuart Hall: identity as production

• "Cultural Identity and Diaspora", in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): identity as never complete and always constituted within representation

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What happens when your presence becomes a question you have to keep answering?

In this episode of The Modern Migrant, Katrina Borissova Frank explores the Belonging Audit: the repeated demand to explain where you come from and whether you really belong, often hidden inside a seemingly innocent question: "So, where are you really from?"

Moving from lived experience to sociology, philosophy and decolonial thought, this episode explores:

• Why some people belong by default, while others are repeatedly asked to account for their presence

• The difference between curiosity and an audit: curiosity can be satisfied, while an audit can always be reopened

• What happens when someone can be born and raised in a country and still be read as foreign

• Pierre Bourdieu's ideas of doxa, habitus and symbolic violence, and how some forms of belonging become so normalised that they disappear from view

• Scott and Lyman's sociology of accounts: what happens when a person is required to explain themselves, and how an account can become both a story and a ledger

• Édouard Glissant's right to opacity: the radical possibility that dignity does not require complete explanation, transparency or legibility

The Belonging Audit does not stay at the border. It travels into workplaces, conversations and dinner parties, and eventually into the self. You begin anticipating the question before it is asked, rehearsing the answer, and deciding which version of yourself will require the least explanation.

The way out is not to become better at passing the audit. It is to question why the audit was yours to pass in the first place.

References:

Pierre Bourdieu: doxa, habitus, field, symbolic violence and misrecognition (méconnaissance)

• Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977): doxa and habitus

• Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979; English translation, Harvard University Press, 1984): distinction, cultural capital and social fields

• The Logic of Practice (Stanford University Press, 1990): habitus and the "sense of one's place"

• Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard University Press, 1991): symbolic power, symbolic violence, misrecognition and linguistic legitimacy

Marvin B. Scott and Stanford M. Lyman: the sociology of accounts

• "Accounts", American Sociological Review, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968), pp. 46–62: excuses, justifications and the social work of explanation

Édouard Glissant: the right to opacity (le droit à l'opacité)

• Poetics of Relation (Poétique de la Relation, 1990; English translation by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997)

• Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity (English translation, 2020)

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What happens when human complexity collides with the social need for simplicity?

In this episode of The Modern Migrant, Katrina Borissova Frank explores Identity Lag: the psychological and social tension that emerges when identity becomes increasingly layered on the inside, while the world keeps responding to simplified, socially legible versions of who we are.

Society rarely interacts with the full complexity of a person. It responds instead to the identities that feel most coherent, recognisable and easy to place, and over time those identities begin to work as social shortcuts. People recognise the category before they recognise the person, and slowly, something more subtle happens: complexity disappears socially.

Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth and Anthony Giddens, this episode explores how identity is shaped through recognition, why social legibility so often requires reduction, and what happens psychologically when evolving human beings are continuously interpreted through identities too narrow to contain them.

In this episode:

• The tension between lived complexity and social simplification

• Why socially legible identities can become emotionally restrictive

• How recognition and misrecognition shape the relationship we develop with ourselves

• The experience of feeling visible yet only partially understood

• Why people who move between cultures often experience identity as fragmented

• What happens when fluid identities move through systems that prefer stability and predictability

At its core, this episode is not simply about migration. It is about the deeper human experience of living inside social systems that struggle to hold contradiction, evolution and complexity.

Because the deepest form of invisibility is not being unseen. It is being seen only partially.

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What happens when belonging is not given, but earned?

In this episode of The Modern Migrant, Katrina Borissova Frank explores the Good Immigrant Script, a phrase borrowed from Nikesh Shukla's anthology: an unspoken system in which acceptance is shaped by behaviour, tone and how closely you align with what is expected. It is not something you are told, but something you learn.

Over time, adaptation becomes strategy, strategy becomes habit, and habit becomes identity, until a distance opens between who you are and who you have learned to be in order to move through the world.

Through personal reflection and philosophical insight, this episode explores:

• Why belonging so often becomes conditional rather than neutral

• How performance is rewarded and quietly internalised

• What happens when identity is shaped by expectation rather than expression

Featuring insights from:

• Nikesh Shukla, on conditional acceptance and cultural legitimacy (The Good Immigrant)

• Dina Nayeri, on gratitude expected as proof of worth (The Ungrateful Refugee)

• Julia Kristeva, on the foreigner within and identity in transit (Strangers to Ourselves)

This episode is not about rejecting adaptation. It is about recognising it, because once you can see the script, you can begin to question it.

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At some point, the voice in your head stops being entirely yours.

It becomes shaped by something else: not imposed, not forced, but absorbed, repeated and eventually believed.

In this episode, I introduce the Borrowed Gaze, the moment external perception stops being something you notice and starts becoming the way you see yourself.

It begins with what I call the First Mirror Moment: a subtle shift in which you realise you are no longer simply living, you are being interpreted.

From there, something changes. Awareness becomes internal, internalisation becomes automatic, and over time you stop asking “Who am I?” and start adjusting to “How am I being seen?”

This is not a single moment but a process:

Awareness → Internalisation → Automation

And inside that process, a distance quietly grows between who you are, who you have learned to perform, and who you have not yet fully reclaimed.

This episode draws on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, not as theory, but as language for something deeply lived: the experience of seeing yourself through more than one lens, and slowly forgetting which one was yours to begin with.

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What happens when identity is no longer tied to one place?

In this first episode of The Modern Migrant, Katrina Borissova Frank explores fragmented identity: the often invisible experience of becoming different versions of yourself across cultures, contexts and expectations, and of being read differently in each of them.

From code-switching and adaptation to the quiet sense of never being fully recognised anywhere, this episode gives language to something many people live but rarely name.

Through reflection, cultural references and contemporary art, we explore:

• Why identity begins to feel divided when you live across worlds
• How adaptation shapes who you become, and who others assume you are
• Why fragmentation is not failure, but evidence of a life lived across several realities at once

This episode isn't about fixing identity. It's about seeing it more clearly, because sometimes the shift is simple: realising it was never just you.

Artists
• Aziza Kadyri, Play Nice (Somerset House Studios)
• Madeleina Kay, visual art and political identity work

Films
• Atlantics, directed by Mati Diop
• Minari, directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Conceptual framework
• Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture: the Third Space and in-betweenness

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The Manifesto: On Identity, Recognition and the Stories We Inherit

There is a version of you that other people have agreed on. It travels ahead of you into rooms. It gets trusted or doubted, understood or misread, and it is rarely the version you live from the inside.

In this opening manifesto, Katrina Borissova Frank introduces the philosophy at the heart of The Modern Migrant. Migration is one lens. The deeper subject is identity, recognition and power, and the hidden social architectures that shape how we become ourselves.

Stories are not decoration. Stories are infrastructure. They shape who belongs, what becomes visible, whose knowledge counts and what we imagine is possible.

Blending sociology, philosophy and decolonial thought with lived experience, this episode explores what happens when your reality becomes more complex than the stories available to explain it. Why do some people feel immediately recognisable, while others spend years translating themselves? What happens when you are seen before you are understood?

This series is for anyone who has been read before they finished their sentence, across borders, languages, classes or rooms. Its aim is not to make you more legible to the systems that read you, but to make those systems more legible to you.

The experience is real. The language is missing. This is where we begin to find it.

Welcome to The Modern Migrant.

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