The Place of Ethnic Identity

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Albanian families, this book explores how ethnic identity is lived, embodied, and performed in everyday life. Building on performativity theory and adapting it to the study of ethnicity and migration, it reveals how belonging, difference, and social boundaries are continually negotiated through everyday practices, relationships, and embodied experiences across Greece and Albania.

This timely contribution to migration studies, anthropology, sociology, and ethnic studies sheds new light on the performative production of ethnic identity. It offers a distinctive perspective on ethnicity, embodiment, and belonging as relational processes shaped by social norms, historical memory, migration, and transnational connections. Through rich ethnographic material, the book demonstrates how seemingly ordinary practices including greetings, celebrations, self-presentation, and language use become meaningful acts through which migrants and their families negotiate inclusion, exclusion, and cultural belonging in contemporary Europe.

Mariangela Veikou is an engaged researcher with a background in the social sciences. Her work connects sociology, anthropology and political philosophy, specialising in questions of identity, inequalities, and citizenship, with particular attention to the lived experiences of racialised, ethnicised subjects as well as the governance of diversity and exclusion. Her recent research looks at processes of digitalisation and automation reshaping these dynamics. Methodologically, her work is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative inquiry, combined with critical discourse analysis.   She has led and contributed to numerous research projects and has served as an expert in international research consortia funded by the European Social Fund, the European Union Framework Programmes, DG JUST of the European Commission, the European Institute at the London School of Economics, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS/KNAW). Her work has been published in interdisciplinary academic journals, including Social Sciences, Cultural Studies, Journal of Civil Society, Qualitative Sociology Review, and Journal of the Balkans and Near Eastern Studies. She is also the co-editor of  Automating Migration and Citizenship. Surveillance, Control and Critique , published by Palgrave Macmillan (2026).