From ‘trailing spouses’ to top ‘expat’ urban translators: Blogging for (self)integration in and through Copenhagen

This chapter focuses on so-called ‘trailing spouses’, typically cast as privileged migrants moving countries under socio-economically advantageous circumstances. Yet their class-based privilege is not only relative but also fragile, due to the often deep unsettling of their established careers, identities, and sense of social embeddedness that the cross-border move ushers in. Focusing on such migrants in Copenhagen, the chapter traces how two of them turned to full time blogging about the city as a means of professional reinvention, ultimately becoming influential online ‘translators’ of Copenhagen for other newcomers. Through these cases, the chapter examines how blogging functioned simultaneously as self employment, a strategy of post relocation integration, and a vehicle for rearticulating these ‘expat’ migrants’ multi-layered identities. Because the blogs were oriented toward presenting and interpreting Copenhagen, the practice of writing about the city actively fostered these migrants’ identities as at once ‘expats’ and Copenhageners. Blogging allowed them to showcase and to deepen their emerging localness, even as it sustained their identity as migrants, with a particular national background, through an ongoing engagement with non Danish, often home-country audiences. The chapter argues that while migrant adaptation always unfolds in and through the city, Copenhagen’s global popularity created particularly fertile conditions for these spouses’ occupational and identity remaking. By highlighting how the specific affordances of Copenhagen shaped their pathways of self reinvention, the chapter demonstrates the constitutive role of the local urban context in shaping migrants’ possibilities for self-reinvention, livelihood-making, and the reconfiguration of their identities.