We are born into stories we did not write, and measured against norms we rarely think to question.
40countries reading
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Stories are infrastructure. Repeated often enough, they shape how we see others, and how we see ourselves.
Identity & recognition
How culture, class, race and nation decide the way a person is seen and valued, and why you so often arrive somewhere to find a version of you already waiting. Read through recognition theory, postcolonial thought and narrative identity.
In the weekly letter
Language & power
Why the same sentence earns trust from one speaker and doubt from another, and why an accent can be charming over coffee and a question about competence in the meeting that matters. Read through linguistic capital, sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis.
In the weekly letter
What feels deeply personal is very often social.
Born in Bulgaria, two years in Spain, raised in France, twenty years in the UK, back in Paris now.
Every country I have lived in taught me the same lesson, in a different accent: you can belong enough to be expected to fit, and never enough to stop explaining.
That in-between has a history, and thinkers who named it long before I felt it. Reading them, what I had taken for a flaw of my own turned out to be a pattern. Pierre Bourdieu (French sociologist) called it linguistic capital: the same accent can be a credential in one country and a question about your competence in the next, though nothing in your voice has changed. No elocution lesson was ever going to fix that, because the accent was never the problem. The value a place assigns to it was.
Membership is where we read them together, so the stories that once described you become stories you can question and, when you choose, rewrite.
Katrina Borissova Frank, founder of The Modern Migrant · LinkedIn
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