Migrant social integration through community participation in urban China
Community participation serves as an entry point for migrants to integrate into the social fabric of the receiving society. This doctoral research aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of how migrant social integration is constructed through community participation by studying internal migrants in two urban villages in Guangzhou, China.
The research began with a scoping review to provide a preliminary overview of how community participation contributes to migrant social integration in the existing literature. Subsequently, adopting a qualitative methodology, this research investigated migrants’ social capital through their community volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic and explored migrant parents’ place attachment during their community participation.
A comparative analysis was conducted to deepen the understanding of how different social settings shaped migrants’ particular integration experiences and to identify causal elements that contribute to their unique social integration. The findings underscored the importance of social and spatial perspectives through which community participation contributes to the social integration of migrants.
The findings also highlighted the complexity of social integration, taking into account both external factors and individual migrant attributes. Overall, this research spotlighted migrants’ community participation as an empowering process that enables migrants to exert agency. It contributed to broader scholarly and policy discussions on the integration of rural-to-urban migrants and community governance of urban villages in China.