What happens when the judgement you are preparing for comes from people who are no longer in the room? In this episode of The Modern Migrant, Katrina explores the rehearsal: the quiet, constant work of adjusting yourself before you speak. The message rewritten four times, the reference dropped mid-sentence, the phone voice, the eight seconds of silence before you speak in a meeting that the room reads as caution and that is actually translation. Moving from lived experience to sociology and cultural theory, this episode explores: Why moving between worlds is wider than migration: class, region, language, profession, and being the only person in the room who looks like you. The difference between feedback and prediction: reading a room is a human skill, but the rehearsal runs before the room has given you anything to respond to. Charles Horton Cooley's looking-glass self, and why what moves us is never the reflection itself but the judgement we imagine behind it. What happens when you live with more than one mirror: the room you are trying to enter reads you for how far you still are from it, while the room you came from reads you for how far you have gone. Erving Goffman's front stage and backstage, his distinction between visible and invisible difference, and the question of where, exactly, your backstage is. How the "correct" way to sound was assembled by people with names, from the Académie française in 1635 to the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English in 1926. Stuart Hall's idea of identity as a production, never complete and always in process, and what that does to the search for the "real" self. The rehearsal does not stay in one room. It travels into meetings, emails, family gatherings and phone calls, until it runs whether or not anybody is watching. The way out is not to stop rehearsing.It is to ask who is on the panel, and whether they ever had the standing to judge you. Charles Horton Cooley: the looking-glass self, imputed judgement Human Nature and the Social Order (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902); the looking-glass self and its three principal elements Erving Goffman: front and back regions, the discredited and the discreditable, covering The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956; expanded edition, New York, Anchor Books, 1959); impression management, front stage and backstageStigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1963); visible and invisible difference, passing and covering Stuart Hall: identity as production "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990); identity as never complete and always constituted within representation Continue the conversationSubscribe to The Modern Migrant on Substack for essays, reflections and conversations that continue beyond the podcast.Join the identity gap circle, a free community for people shaped by migration and diaspora exploring identity, recognition and life between worlds.
