Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration

Abstract

Migrant life experiences and the migration process offer a rich, complex and under-examined field for social research on emotion. This article introduces this Special Issue collection of papers, all authored by migration scholars, by providing an overview of migration and emotions studies, hopefully inspiring further scholarly work and orienting newcomers to the field. We examine research to date on topics such as the development of emotional life “on the move” over time and space; the interface between emotion in proximity and from a distance; the influence of mobility on emotional cultures and on their changing social and ethnic boundaries; the mixed ways in which emotions are dis-embodied and re-embodied – out of place and re-emplaced – in response to migrant life trajectories. In all of these domains, available research points to the migrant emotional condition as a complex and multifaceted one. Far from being the opposite of the instrumental (i.e. economically-driven) dimension of migrant life, the emotional dimension is its inescapable complement, in which ambivalence is more common than straightforward “either (home-)/or (host-oriented)” emotional states. The relevance of emotion to the debate on immigrant integration, identity and belonging, and the political significance of emotion both for top-down politics and day-to-day ethnic relations, is also analysed. A case is made for further comparative, multi-method and interdisciplinary research on migration and emotion given the important intersections of these fields.