Migration Narratives Research Articles

Linked Lives: Exploring the Narratives of Second-Generation Migrants in Nepal

This article describes the narratives of second-generation migrants in Nepal. The paper explores the reasons for migration as shared with their offspring by first-generation migrants. The article also shares the narratives by second-generation migrants on experiences of family, school, community, and the State. Second-generation migrants or adult offspring of first-generation migrants from Tibet and India comprised the sampling frame for the qualitative study. Data were collected through a non-probability sampling technique, and in-depth semi-structured interview schedules were used. Nine in-depth interviews were conducted for the study. Thematic analysis was employed to examine the data. Key reasons to migrate to Nepal featured in the narratives of the migrants were opportunities for business, availability of good education, and a suitable climate in Nepal. Furthermore, lack of opportunities for employment and education and instances of violence at their place of origin pushed the migrants towards Nepal. Most of the interviewees shared having solid bonds with their families. They shared mixed experiences (both encouraging and humiliating) at school and varied experiences in their interaction with the broader society (both supportive and conflicting). Furthermore, all interviewees shared challenges in dealing with or receiving help from the Nepali State.

Poetic representations of migration narratives: A process of writing nearby

AbstractThis article proposes an alternative and reflexive practice for representing migration narratives, referred to as a process of writing nearby. It is informed by ethnography of communication and performance‐based theory (i.e. ethnopoetics and poetic inquiry) and provides a theoretically grounded approach, using mimetic configuration, so as to challenge more conventional methods of ethnographical writing. The outcome is presented in the form of poetic narrative suites; the example included here is based on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnography. The article argues for the use of poetics as a way of calling for the activation of the reader's imagination, represent multisensorial experiences, illuminate linguistic resourcefulness and illustrate alternative models of speakerhood. Thus, it contributes to the developing field of arts‐based research in sociolinguistics by critically engaging with the notion of voice, and by outlining a creative method for handling the limitations of textual representation.

No place like home: Sociocultural drivers of return migration among Israeli academic families

AbstractResearch on return migration of the highly skilled is dominated by economic reasoning, whereas nonmaterial drivers of their repatriation are poorly understood. This study explored the journeys of 22 Israeli academic families who returned home after 3–7 years of (post)doctoral training in the United States/Canada. The migration narratives of these families, belonging to Israeli Ashkenazi elites, were interpreted using Bourdieu's concepts of cultural and social capital. Feeing alienated as immigrants in the American academia and society, most returnees reckoned that their professional potential could be maximised only at home. They manifested strong national identities, cultural and filial attachments and wanted their children to grow up Israeli. However, facing precarious Israeli realities, the informants described their return as second migration. Within 2 years, most scientists landed academic or research positions at home and were satisfied with their work lives. Their ‘trailing wives’ have typically paid a higher career tax for their American sojourn, yet no couples in the sample regretted their return decision. Thus, purely economic explanations of mobility among academics and other professionals may overlook salient sociocultural forces shaping family‐based return decisions.

Evlad-ı Fatihan: marquer la comformabilité des immigrants des Balkans en Turquie

This research aims to explore historical and spatial references conveyed by the term evlad-ı fatihan, a designation used in Balkan homeland associations in Turkey since the late 1980s. Drawing mostly on interviews conducted with members and directors of multiple homeland associations in Istanbul and also on observations made in these institutions between 2013 and 2015, the study opens a discussion on how references to Ottoman heritage and to Islam were experienced and interpreted by the actors and investigates how the usage of evlad-ı fatihan produced an anachronistic narrative of post-imperial migration and an “invented tradition.”

Book Reviews

Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso Books, 2018), 272 pp. $34.95.Carl Middleton, Rebecca Elmhirst, and Supang Chantavanich, eds., Living with Floods in a Mobile Southeast Asia: A Political Ecology of Vulnerability, Migration and Environmental Change (New York: Routledge, 2018), 202 pp. $160.00 (hardback).Cajetan Iheka and Jack Taylor, eds., African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press/Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), 310 pp., ten black and white illustrations. $125.00.Jie Zhang, Cultural Politics of Railways (Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2018, in Chinese), 310 pp., eight illustrations. ¥88.00.Markku Hokkanen, Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 288 pp. £80.Natasha Pairaudeau, Mobile Citizens: French Indians in Indochina, 1858–1954 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016), 370 pp., three maps, eighteen illustrations, two tables. £25.

The Dialectics of Race: Proletarian Literature, Richard Wright, and the Making of Revolutionary Subjectivity

Abstract As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

"Meine eigene Geschichte": Identity Construction Through Reading in Abbas Khider's Der falsche Inder

This article examines issues of authorship, identity, and narrative form in Abbas Khider’s 2008 novel Der falsche Inder as developed through its thematization of reading. The novel presents a narrative of twenty-first century forced migration that challenges general assumptions about the identity formation of migrants by staging interventions in established discourses on literary authority and authenticity. While tropes of writing and authorship tend to dominate such discourses, the novel’s focus on reading, largely overlooked in the scholarship on the novel to date, repositions the debate. By undercutting romanticized notions of authorship and originality with the physical, material, and economic realities of migration, the novel exposes the bourgeois preconditions of such romanticized notions. This article argues that the novel’s depiction of identity construction revolving around reading instead of writing foregrounds the power of readers to construct not only their own identity but also that of the figures they read about. The novel destabilizes notions of identity for both migrant and author figures by focusing on the constructive power readers have in shaping the identities of migrants and their narratives. Literary theories of narration and reading as well as social theories of form and formation elucidate the novel’s critique of the current fetishization of originality and authenticity in the public literary discourse on so-called Migrations- or Migrantenliteratur.

The Returns of the Roman de la terre: Défricheurs and Other Migrants in the Canadien Colonial Imaginary

Popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Québec farm novels, or romans de la terre, have been studied by critics across the humanities and social sciences as discursive spaces through which notions of Franco-Canadien identity and territoriality have been, and continue to be, negotiated. Building on these critiques, my study suggests that these rural works that narrativize colonization and celebrate agriculturalist ideology may also be read as migration narratives—a roman de la terre can also be a roman de la migration. Analyzing three distinct migrant types in Louis Hémon’s 1913 novel Maria Chapdelaine, I demonstrate how notions of migrancy in this emblematic work bear commitments to settler-colonialist attitudes towards land and identity—a relationship that has persisted from the days of the fin-de-siècle rural exodus to contemporary Québec with its colonialistic economic initiatives.

The politics of translating ethnographic ideoscapes the death and life of Aida Hernandez: a border story

The ecology of immigration discourse is an ideoscape in flux. It is a landscape constructed along human mobility, lifeworlds, ontological state security as well as along emotional and institutional complexities. There has been significant recent proliferation of border literature and ethnographies that represent narratives of migrants on the U.S-Mexico border. Ethnography as non-fiction literature documents border trajectories. This paper seeks to address how these trajectories are represented and or translated through a case study of the non-fiction work, The death and life of Aida Hernandez: a border story by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2019) in which there is a distinct ecology in the ethos of ethnography and immigrant criminalization. This case study assesses therefore the relation between the politics of ethnographic ideoscapes, translation and agency based upon Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak & Kollner, 2008; Wodak & Meyer, 2016) as well as evaluation and decision-making (Munday, 2012) when translating ethnography as a genre of represented voices.

Transnationalism and Testimonio in Contemporary Central American Migrant Literature

This article explores contemporary Central American literature dealing with transnationalism in migrant narratives from the region within the framework of testimonio. The transnational elements in literary texts read as testimonio were also present in previous Latin American narratives but were ignored in critical writing about this genre. These elements often included two countries, and involved transmission of, as well as continuous negotiation between, different languages. Moreover, the immediate translation of these texts into English made them available more to an international audience than to the citizens of the countries in which they were mostly set. Taking Odyssey to the North by Mario Bencastro, and The Tattooed Soldier by Hector Tobar as my point of reference, I will argue that these and several other contemporary Central American works of fiction can be read as testimonio. These works, by focusing attention on the repercussions of the civil war in a new context, depict migration to the United States

Refugees to the Rescue? Motivating Pro-Refugee Public Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic

AbstractMigrants are often scapegoated during public health crises. Can such crises create opportunities for migrant inclusion instead? As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, many refugee organizations have stepped up their outreach with stories of refugees helping out in the crisis. We have partnered with the country’s leading refugee advocate organizations to test whether solidarity narratives increase public engagement with refugee advocates. We employ a Facebook experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of refugee narratives. We test whether (1) migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19, (2) COVID-19 migrant narratives targeted to more or less local communities, and (3) COVID-19 migrant narratives labeled as refugee vs. immigrant efforts enhance public engagement with refugee organizations. Our results indicate that migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19 do not motivate greater engagement than those that make no mention of the pandemic. Our results provide suggestive evidence that locally targeted efforts motivate greater engagement. Finally, we find no difference between the “refugee” and “immigrant” label, but we show that both labels can motivate greater engagement than ads that include neither. Importantly, this is true even in the context of COVID-19, an uncertain environment where worries of backlash might be warranted. These results suggest promising strategies for migrant policy organizations to promote engagement during and possibly after the pandemic.

Twenty-First Century “New” Greek Transnational Migration to Canada

This article derives from a qualitative study of the “new” migration from Greece to Canada, resulting from a severe socioeconomic crisis in Greece. Starting from the migration narratives of 20 “new” Greek migrants in Halifax and Toronto, this research focuses on how the “new” migrants make and carry out the decision to leave and immigrate to Canada. A heuristic use and reconceptualized understanding of the classic “push-pull” model, in conjunction with a transnational migration perspective, allows mapping out, through rich qualitative data, the structure—agency articulation in the “out-of-Greece-and-into-Canada” mobility of 21st century “new” Greek migrants.

Migrant and Refugee Impact on Well-Being in Rural Areas: Reframing Rural Development Challenges in Greece.

The paper aims to exemplify and discuss the changing conditions and challenges posed by the newly arriving populations of migrants and refugees in rural Greece, along with local people’s views on the impact of the new arrivals in their rural places. Its main objective is to understand whether migrants and refugees create threats or opportunities for the local population, and whether movers and non-movers have a shared understanding of well-being in their rural areas. The analysis unveils the connections that are emerging between migrants and refugees and the economy, society and culture in rural receiving areas. Thus, the paper aims at showing the complexity of rural migrant flows and how the interactions between migrants, refugees and locals in the light of the well-being of rural areas may inform rural development in Greece. The paper is structured into five main sections following the introduction. The first section contains a discussion of the main concepts used as building blocks for creating a theoretical framing of well-being in rural areas. The second section develops a brief discussion of international and internal migration to rural areas in Greece, as well as providing some contextual information on the impact of the economic crisis and new developments in response to the recession. The third section includes a short presentation of the methodological approach and a description of the case study area. The fourth section is dedicated to an analysis of the narratives of international migrants, refugees, internal migrants, locals and stakeholders. Finally, the concluding section critically discusses the conceptualisations of rurality and well-being between the various population groups and articulates the challenges connected to well-being and mobilities in contemporary rural Greece.

A Risk Exchange: Health and Mobility in the Context of Climate and Environmental Change in Bangladesh-A Qualitative Study.

Background: Climate change influences patterns of human mobility and health outcomes. While much of the climate change and migration discourse is invested in quantitative predictions and debates about whether migration is adaptive or maladaptive, less attention has been paid to the voices of the people moving in the context of climate change with a focus on their health and wellbeing. This qualitative research aims to amplify the voices of migrants themselves to add nuance to dominant migration narratives and to shed light on the real-life challenges migrants face in meeting their health needs in the context of climate change. Methods: We conducted 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrants purposefully selected for having moved from rural Bhola, southern Bangladesh to an urban slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis under the philosophical underpinnings of phenomenology. Coding was conducted using NVivo Pro 12. Findings: We identified two overarching themes in the thematic analysis: Firstly, we identified the theme “A risk exchange: Exchanging climate change and health risks at origin and destination”. Rather than describing a “net positive” or “net negative” outcome in terms of migration in the context of climate change, migrants described an exchange of hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities at origin with those at destination, which challenged their capacity to adapt. This theme included several sub-themes—income and employment factors, changing food environment, shelter and water sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) conditions, and social capital. The second overarching theme was “A changing health and healthcare environment”. This theme also included several sub-themes—changing physical and mental health status and a changing healthcare environment encompassing quality of care and barriers to accessing healthcare. Migrants described physical and mental health concerns and connected these experiences with their new environment. These two overarching themes were prevalent across the dataset, although each participant experienced and expressed them uniquely. Conclusion: Migrants who move in the context of climate change face a range of diverse health risks at the origin, en route, and at the destination. Migrating individuals, households, and communities undertake a risk exchange when they decide to move, which has diverse positive and negative consequences for their health and wellbeing. Along with changing health determinants is a changing healthcare environment where migrants face different choices, barriers, and quality of care. A more migrant-centric perspective as described in this paper could strengthen migration, climate, and health governance. Policymakers, urban planners, city corporations, and health practitioners should integrate the risk exchange into practice and policies.

Appeals to shared Africanness: Negotiating precarious childhoods and intra-African migration in two coming-of-age narratives in contemporary South Africa

Child and youth migration has not only been marginalized within scholarship on literary engagements with global migratory processes, but has also, for the most part, been studied in the narrow context of movements from the Global South to the Global North. This essay examines the complex dynamics of child and youth migration manifest in narratives of migration to South Africa from elsewhere on the African continent. Focusing on the coming-of-age of young migrants and refugees in Meg Vandermerwe’s novel Zebra Crossing (2013) and Aher Arop Bol’s refugee memoir The Lost Boy (2009), I argue that the texts critique common readings of African childhoods as either utopian or dystopian and move beyond dichotomous framings of young migrants through the lens of victimhood or criminality. The texts highlight young migrants’ precarious experiences relating to intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, ability and immigration status, while at the same time foregrounding their situated, relational agency that is often negotiated through appeals to shared Africanness. Drawing on scholarship on the postcolonial Bildungsroman, I suggest that both texts deploy the form to reclaim access to – and subject to criticism – the current human rights order. By focusing on intra-African migration, this essay extends literary migration scholarship to address how the selected texts exact new vocabularies and alternative imaginaries for the study of contemporary migration narratives.

Forming the capacity to aspire: young refugees’ narratives of family migration and wellbeing

ABSTRACT Proposing that the capacity to aspire is a critical component of young people’s wellbeing, this article explores how three young people with refugee backgrounds envision their future, by narratively linking it with their family migration (hi)story and their present life. The analysis draws on student interviews conducted during a 2012–2013 study of Danish upper secondary students’ health and wellbeing in relation to their peers, school life and family life. The three young people’s narratives, entitled ‘aspiring to succeed’, ‘aspiring to heal’ and ‘stuck in (hi)story’, reflect how in different ways they relate past, present and future by drawing on various social, narrative and temporal resources, producing varying senses of agency and capacities to aspire. The young people’s desire to meet parental expectations and heal losses experienced in relation to flight and resettlement may be an aspirational resource or may create a costly pressure.

The «invisible enemy» and the usual suspects. How Covid-19 re-framed migration in Italian media representations

The last decade has been characterized by an intense inflow of people into borders of what has been called the "Fortress Europe". Italian governments, from Gentiloni-Minniti to Conte-Salvini, have implemented restrictive border management and migration control measures, fueled also by an over mediatization of the issue in and by public discourses. However, from February 2020 public debates and narratives have been dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a health emergency often described as a war against an invisible enemy. Through a qualitative analysis of Italian media representations, this paper analyses how Covid-19 overshadowed and reframed migration narratives and discourses. Moving within the concept of (in)visibility, this paper explores the two macrodiscourses around migration during the lockdown: on one side, the link between migration and illness (fear of infection) that led to strict border security measures; on the other, the utilitaristic x\regularization of migrants working in informal economy. The conclusion reflects on long-term implications of the pandemic on mobility justice (Sheller 2018) and what Mbembe (2020) has defined the "right to breath".

Climate change migration in the post‐conflict state: Understanding Cambodian migration narratives through geopolitical history and land struggles

While there has been increasing scholarship exploring the social, cultural, and political dimensions of climate change migration, there is to date limited research situating climate migration studies within geopolitical history and land struggles, particularly in post‐conflict states like Cambodia. Four decades after the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975–1979) ended, rural migration and land struggles remain a central aspect of Cambodia's political and economic life. Since the beginning of the Cambodian civil war (1970), rural populations have repeatedly been forced to move from their land. However, the geopolitical dimension of land has not been widely considered in current climate change migration literature. To explore these dynamic relationships between land, migration, and geopolitical history, this paper investigates both historical narratives and everyday relationships with land of land(less) migrants in Veal Veaeng District, Western Cambodia, a former war zone and a Khmer Rouge stronghold during the 1980s and 1990s. This paper argues that political history plays a vital role in defining migration trajectories in Cambodia, especially how historical factors define land struggles. Through exploring migrants and land frontier dynamics, this paper discovers that poor peasants have been forced between labour markets and land frontiers.

Short Take: Walking Interviews with Refugee-background Women

Walking interviews generate contextualized dialogs and place-based narratives prompted by sites and routes. We used walking interviews with three refugee-background women in Australia to find out what the act of walking could reveal about notions of home and broader narratives of forced migration. We used a participatory approach to privilege women’s perspectives as co-creators of new knowledge on the topic.

Understanding Migrant Masculinities through a Spatially Intersectional Lens

This article analyzes migrant narratives on masculinity through an intersectional perspective that is sensitive to spatial aspects. Drawing on research with migrants in Berlin and Munich in Germany, we unpack how (self-identified) Polish men in these cities negotiate their gender identities vis-à-vis other people whom they perceive as ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual others. We address how their social and ethnic backgrounds shape their narratives on foreign masculinities and femininities at the intersection of ethnicity and gender. In particular, we draw attention to how these negotiations are entangled with local discourses over the presence and visibility of various immigrant groups and cosmopolitan queer communities in the cities. The intersectional approach helps us to formulate how masculine identities change within the context of migration.