Living on the Move: Mobility, Religion and Exclusion of Eastern European Migrants in Rural Scotland Sergei Shubin* Department of Geography, Swansea University, Wales UK ABSTRACT The paper explores theoretical and practical issues related to spiritual mobility and engagement with Eastern European migrants in rural Scotland. Emerging mobile lifestyles create different patterns of living ‘on the move’, but the church and other rural institutions in Scotland often fail to attend to migrants’ affective relationships with existing immigrant communities, unpredictable travelling behaviour, and cross-border spiritual links. For this gap to be addressed, the paper develops a complex understanding of migrants living on the move. It suggests adding a spiritual element to the analysis of transnational mobilities and explores the ways in which constellations of mobility and religion generate more-than-corporeal dislocations (faith-based sensations), generate virtual movement (beyond rationality to the outside of knowing), and create new imaginations of the migrants’ place in the world. It argues that the spiritual can be seen as an important factor in producing new social worlds and overcoming the separations and division created by migrations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 17 September 2011 Keywords: mobility; exclusion; religion; disadvantage INTRODUCTION his paper studies the relationship between transnational migration and religion in the context of rural Scotland, where differ- ent mobile groups have often struggled to ‘fit’ within the existing local communities and to gain social acceptance (Shubin and Swanson, 2010; Shubin, 2011). In particular, it focuses on the meanings and practices of religion in the daily lives of Eastern European migrants, 1 which are often not accommodated in the government’s in- clusion strategies (Markova and Black, 2007). It engages with different modalities of the rela- tional, uncertain, and transformative mobile being of Eastern European migrants, particularly focusing on spiritual elements of their mobilities. In so doing, it uncovers the ways in which con- stellations of mobility and religion generate more-than-corporeal dislocations, produce vir- tual movement, and create new imaginations of the migrants’ place in the world. East European migrants are misrepresented in the existing statistics with estimates for post- 2004 Eastern European migrants in Scotland varying between 30,000 (EHRC, 2010) and 36,000 (Pollard et al., 2008). There is a clear lack of statistical evidence on Eastern European mi- gration flows and Scottish in-migration within the broader UK statistics (Scottish Government, 2009), which leads to these migrants dropping out of the policy frameworks and being over- looked in comparison with refugees or asylum seekers (Hickman et al., 2008). The situation in Scotland remains relatively under-researched (Jentsch et al., 2007; De Lima et al., 2007), and the diversity of migrants from the former social- ist countries is often misrepresented due to their settling in smaller and rural communities (TUC, 2004). *Correspondence to: Sergei Shubin, Department of Geography, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP Wales, UK. E-mail: s.v.shubin@swansea.ac.uk T Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE Popul. Space Place (2011) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/psp.696