Apologies for cross-posting, this may interest some list members

 

Call for Papers:

 

Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers,

New Orleans, 10^th-14^th April, 2018.

 

Animating Migration Theory

 

Organisers: Sergei Shubin (Swansea University) and Francis Collins (University of Auckland)

 

As a phenomenon underpinned by fluidity and radical difference, migration always escapes simple modes of representation and reductive theorisations. Indeed, as the dramatic events of the last decade have demonstrated, migration regularly takes shape around new scenarios, follows unpredictable routes and often involves migrant lives that exceed the expectations and restrictions of mainstream migration studies and policy orthodoxies.

 

Over the last few years geographers and other social scientists have started to embrace this excess, generating new and exciting approaches that broaden the boundaries of traditional migration models and dominant migration imaginaries. Renewed interest in the subjects of migration (Findlay et al., 2013; Nail, 2015; Collins 2017; Engebrigsten, 2017), for example, questions the framing of individualised lives and decisions in migration, explores dominant figures of migration and stresses in-stability, openness and becoming of mobile people. Similarly, re-conceptualizations of migration as being-on-the-move driven by desire and potentiality (Papandopolous et al., 2008; Shubin, 2015; Carling and Collins, 2017) opens up conventional definitions of mobility, movement and displacement predicated on binary conceptualizations of place and placelessness. And, rethinking and retheorising approaches to managing and territorializing migration (Anderson, 2013; Tazzioli, 2015; Pecoud, 2015; Shubin, 2016) exposes a version of the world founded on rationality and utility that establishes the powerful divisions between reason and un-reason in shaping cross-border mobilities.

 

This session seeks to bring together papers that address these and other theoretical concerns, develop new critical understandings of migrant timespaces and animate the field of contemporary migration studies to include insights from different domains of social sciences. We therefore welcome conceptual papers that open the boundaries of migration thought and include but are not limited to the following themes:

• Contested constructions of migrant subjectivities: making and re-making of migration subjects, different cuts across the axes of identity, status and power
• State, territory and organisation: relationship between mobility and stasis, representations of cross-border movement, (b)ordering mobile lives
• Migration process: desires, flows, drivers, connectivity and ruptures in mobility and being-on-the-move
• Space and time in migration: home, homeliness and home-making in migration, incompleteness and connected times, complexity and situatedness of migrant lives
• Migration materialities: different (im)material effects of dislocations, animated matter, mobilized cultures, memories and language, inter-relations between movement of people, things, technologies, and ideas

 

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words by 15th October to: Sergei Shubin[log in to unmask] and Francis Collins [log in to unmask]. 

 

References:

 

Anderson, B. (2013) Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carling, J. & Collins, F.L. (2017) Aspiration, Desire and the Drivers of Migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2017.1384134

Collins, F.L. (2017) Desire as a theory for migration studies: temporality, assemblage and becoming in the narratives of migrants. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2017.1384147.

Engebrigtsen, A. (2017). Key Figure of Mobility: The nomad. Social Anthropology, 25, 42-54.

Findlay, A., McCollum, D., Shubin, S., Apsite, E. & Krisjane, Z. (2013). The role of recruitment agencies in imagining and producing the ‘good’ migrant. Social & Cultural Geography 14(2), 145-167.

Nail, T. (2015) The Figure of the Migrants. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Papadopoulos, D., Stephenson, N. and Tsianos, V. (2008). Escape routes: control and subversion in the 21st century. London: Pluto Press.

Pecoud, A. (2015) Depoliticising Migration. Global Governance and International Migration Narratives, Basingstoke: Palgrave

Shubin, S. (2015). Migration timespaces: a Heideggerian approach to understanding the mobile being of Eastern Europeans in Scotland. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40(3), 350-361.

Shubin, S. (2016) Critical Perspectives on Histories of ‘Madness’ and Migration. In Harper, M. (Ed.), Migration and Mental Health - Past and Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tazzioli, M. (2015). Spaces of Governmentality. Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings. Rownam and Littlefield.