Reconstructing biographical knowledge: Biographical policy evaluation toward a structural understanding of transnational migration

Abstract

In our article, we address how migrants in transnational spaces are affected by policies of citizenship, language policies, labor market, and education and training policies, among others. The analysis of autobiographical narrative interviews can provide methodical access to latently effective structures of transnational spaces. Transnational spaces can be conceptualized as opaque structures of multiply interconnected state, legal, and cultural transitions toward which individuals orient themselves biographically and in which they are simultaneously intertwined as collectives of experience. Transnational biographical knowledge is not only a result of subjective agency, but at the same time produces the structure of migration biographies, which are experienced and repeatedly reconstructed by migrating subjects. Through biographical policy evaluation we analyze policies and their simultaneous and sometimes paradoxical effects that force family members to find solutions for shaping their life practice. Thus, members of a family of several generations might be affected differently by policies due to their incomplete rights and family status, age, and gender. In reconstructing biographical evaluations, typical effects of the underlying policies can be discerned and critically assessed.