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

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.