From rural laborer to migrant broker: A narrative case study of aspirational recalibration and circular mobility

Abstract Circular migration has long been pivotal to rural survival, yet its moral, aspirational, and sociospatial dimensions remain underexamined compared to large-scale, economic, and demographic patterns. This article investigates how aspirations are shaped, recalibrated, and acquire meaning over the life course, drawing on a single case narrative reconstruction from a larger doctoral research project. Following the trajectory of Mustafa, a seasonal laborer turned informal broker in Turkey, the analysis demonstrates how migration under structural precarity can operate as a form of capital, converted and re-invested into location-specific capabilities through translocal infrastructures, reputational credit, moral economies, and embeddedness in multi-sited social worlds of brokerage. Findings trace this vicarious mobility within the ongoing recalibration of aspirations as a moral practice rooted in lived hardship, blurred lines of care and complicity expressed through protective responsibility, and the authority derived from them. This study thus extends the aspirations-capabilities framework by situating temporal recalibration across the life course, beyond the pre-migration stage. It also methodologically demonstrates the value of single-case narrative reconstruction for analytical generalization, offering thick, empirically transferable insights for theoretical assessment in constructivist-interpretivist migration research.