Embracing transnational approaches for a more thorough and critical understanding of occupation in research on migration

Abstract

ABSTRACT In occupational science, migration has mainly been considered as an ‘uprooting’ experience and occupational scientists have examined the centrality of occupation in migrants’ integration in their receiving countries. Concerned about occupational injustices, occupational scientists have aimed at uncovering barriers that migrants face in their occupations and how these barriers can be overcome in their receiving countries. Migrants’ connections to their sending countries have been considered mainly as a cultural background that ought to be negotiated in the integration process, but the occupation-based literature has, to date, largely disregarded migrants’ ongoing cross-border occupations. We argue that occupational science could benefit from and contribute to theorisations of transnationalism, through examination of the ties migrants maintain across borders through occupation, especially with their sending countries. Firstly, we introduce transnationalism as an essentially occupational phenomenon. Migrants’ transnational occupations are embedded in their lives and ought to be included in occupational science research. Secondly, we argue that transnational approaches would further critical understandings of migrants’ occupations by taking into account power dynamics operating within and beyond the borders of their receiving nation-states and by countering methodological nationalism and assimilationist approaches to integration. Finally, we present shortcomings in current theorisations of transnationalism. We argue that occupational science could contribute to addressing these shortcomings through its unique disciplinary perspective as well as body of theories and methods related to the spatiality of occupation.