This paper analyzes different individual and family paths rather marked by social, professional, geographical and residential discontinuities. Members of the different groups that constitute French society were interviewed by a research team, between 2004 and 2007, to seize how families and individuals play with social and spatial borders, displace them, overstep them or construct them in their activities. Our results show that breaking given borders, as that of diploma, for instance, which is much valued by some actors, helps develop tendencies to overstep social borders or at least, not to naturalize them as much or even more than social or professional mobility itself. Spatial borders (most particularly country or district borders) are often mentioned in these interviews. The fact that they are perceived and played with is closely linked to such experiences of displacement and rupture.
Paths; Ruptures; Borders; Mobility; Experience; France