Alba Montes Sánchez: The affective ambivalence of migration privilege

Alba Montes Sánchez (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

BSP Research Seminar 2026

Session 4

Alba Montes Sánchez

Online | November | Free

The 2026 season of the BSP Research Seminar runs for five months from August to December, with one session every month featuring a speaker from the world of phenomenology.

Alba Montes Sánchez

The affective ambivalence of migration privilege

Date and time: Thursday 12 November 2026, 16:00–17:30 UK/Ireland time, corresponding to 17:00–18:30 Madrid time

The notion of privilege has become increasingly prevalent in recent analyses of the marginalization of oppressed minorities. Activists urge increasing number of groups to “check their privilege” — for example, racial or gender privilege — and take responsibility for what they find. For a great number of people, this process can cause unpleasant emotions such as discomfort, guilt or shame. Thus, philosophers are devoting more and more attention to the phenomenology and moral psychology of discomfort in these morally-laden contexts, and a debate has emerged on whether or not discomfort can be morally productive and, if so, how best to harness it towards social justice.

In this talk, I focus on a case that is seldom discussed in the literature: discomfort about migration privilege. My aim is to take the first steps towards an account of the moral emotional landscape of this ambiguous form of privilege. In other words, I seek to map and explore the consequences of the ambivalent feelings that migrants who relocate in comparatively advantaged financial, legal or cultural conditions experience about their situation. I do this based on the preliminary study of three vignettes from fieldwork among intra-EU migrants, to show that discomfort about privilege can have, at least, two opposing consequences. On the one hand, it has the counter-productive effect of leading privileged migrants to trying to ignore and neglecting to address their own suffering linked to migratory grief, for example. Nonetheless, on the other, it can increase solidarity and encourage building bridges towards less privileged migrants to improve everyone’s conditions.

Find out more about session 4 - including free online joining instructions - and the remaining session of the BSP Research Seminar 2026 at BSP Online.