Political Moves: Cultural Geographies of Migration and Difference

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of cultural-geographic studies of migration. Indeed, in a recent review of migration studies, population geographer Russell King (2012: 143) points out that not only have cultural geographers been major contributors to recent studies of migration, but also “migration geographers . . . [have become] some of the key protagonists of the new cultural geography, and their papers have contributed an ever-increasing share of the contents of the leading journals in human geography since the mid-1990s.” This expansion of interest is a response to both empirical changes in global migration and shifts in theoretical priorities in geography and cognate fields. As places and “cultures” have grown increasingly deeply interconnected across space and as growing absolute numbers of migrants have traveled to rising numbers of places in increasingly complex patterns, the migrant has emerged as a key figure embodying, enacting, and representing the fears and hopes attached to globalization. The cultural politics of migration, thus, have required attention not only to the spatial demographies of migration but also to the social processes of meaning-making in relation to citizenship, borders, identities, and labor markets, as well as discourses and histories of racialization and gender relations. Through attention to migrants’ lived geographies, recent research brings to life the political dimensions of migrants’ cultural geographies. In this chapter, I argue that cultural geography, and in particular feminist cultural geography, offers conceptual tools that have been especially illuminating for the rapidly changing lived politics of migration. The chapter is organized around three main themes. First, it traces concepts of control and dominance in migration studies, examining cultural-geographic approaches to politicaleconomic structures, state policies, labor markets, and the securitization practices and disciplinary discourses that underpin heightened surveillance and everyday policing of migrants. Second, the chapter focuses on subjectivities and the ways migrants as embodied subjects