Migration Discourse Research Articles

“Me? At this age?”: A narrative analysis of older South Asian Muslim immigrant women’s subjectivity-formations in migration arrangements

Abstract Critical and feminist ageing scholarship has drawn attention to how dominant discourses of ageing negatively impact older women's identities and social lives. While research intersecting migration and ageing has broadly focused on older immigrants' settlement experiences, very little is known about the discursive influences over older immigrant women's sense of agency and social relations. To address this knowledge gap, this study explores the subjectivity-formations of older South Asian Muslim women engaged in transnational migration. Narrative and discourse analysis principles were used to conduct and analyse life story-based interviews with 15 South Asian Muslim older women who recently migrated to Toronto, Canada. Findings indicate that participant subjectivity-formations are shaped by: (a) discourses of ageing; (b) socio-cultural–religious discourses; and (c) discourses of transnational migration. In response, participants engaged in dynamic strategies including conforming, negotiating, creating alternative narratives and/or resisting these discourses to organise their lives. These findings reinforce the continued need to trace the governmentality of structural conditions over ageing migrant women's lives and their responsive strategies to manage these impacts.

Emotive vocabulary as a manipulative marker of destruction in the migrant-oriented discourse of mass media: Based on the material of the European Union, Russia, Armenia and Kazakhstan

Any migration shows the full range of emotional assessments of people, which often leads to behavioral destructions. Emotive linguomigratiology recognizes that emotions play a decisive role in the adaptation of the host linguoculture. Migration transforms communication, post-Soviet Russophony has a significant linguistic and cultural distance depending on the country of origin. The analysis of empirical material made it possible to distinguish between migration discourse and migrant-oriented discourses reflecting the problems of migration and migrants. The analysis of the emotive space of the post-Soviet migrant-oriented discourse is based on the theory of emotions and linguomigrationology, taking into account the principle of representativeness. This approach allows us to dissect the macrostructure of polycode migrant-oriented discourses of Armenia, the EU, Kazakhstan and Russia, interpret these discourses in the context of emotivity of different linguistic cultures, solving communicative tasks. The difference in the perception of ethnopsycholinguistic norms in migration processes contributes to the appearance of linguistic and cultural shock in all participants of migration, modeling the development of negative scenarios in both the releasing and the receiving society. The relevance of the proposed work is due to the growth of migration between the countries of Europe and Asia, which naturally increases the interest in studying the ethno-sociocultural characteristics of these countries. Analyzing another world through the prism of a foreign language means entering another culture with other speech and behavioral norms, causing changes in the value matrix of a linguistic personality. Gaps in the background knowledge of the host country become a source of emotively colored vocabulary in the speech of migrants. The article is written on the material of open sources of mass media. The article is intended for specialists in the field of migration, political science, linguistics, intercultural communication, history, psychology, sociology, journalism.

The Economic Prospects of Sustainable Labour Migration and the Need for a Legal Framework in Nigeria

Sustainable development has been a germane concept to international policy since the year 1992. The concept of Sustainable development also serves as a springboard for understanding labour migration as a phenomenon for the economic viability and social sustainability of developing and developed nations. This is because labour migration is a phenomenon that is rooted within the strata of socio-political sustainability, one of the recognized pillars of sustainable development. From the standpoint of migration history in Nigeria, migration has persisted internally in the form of rural-urban migration driven by varying socio-economic factors and externally, in the form of labour migration with a significant number of young Nigerians, many of whom are not deterred by the risks associated with travelling to Europe via unsafe paths, exploring some of these paths. Nigerian youths consisting of individuals aged between 15-35 years also comprise the largest population of migrants from the Global South seeking opportunities in other countries outside Europe. The ILO, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs-Statistical Division and the International Organization for Migration in development circles have advanced the discourse of labour migration whilst prompting countries to mainstream strategies that would allow the benefits of labour migration to be fully maximized. An ethical legal framework in sending countries (being developing countries in most cases, and in this instance referring to Nigeria) and receiving countries (being developed countries in most cases and in this instance referring to countries in Europe). It is within this framework that the economic prospects of labour migration can be properly reaped. In establishing a legal framework for Nigeria, it is important to consider what the country stands to lose with sustained outflow of youths and professionals required for nation building to Europe and sectors in Europe, this consideration would guide the concessions that can be made in the design of Bilateral Labour Agreements between Nigeria and Sending countries. The researcher of this work ultimately contemplates the realization of a legal framework in the form of a legislation that will strongly define labour migration in Nigeria, which would also be a consolidation of prior efforts channeled towards establishing a labour migration policy for Nigeria. The Research methodology utilized in this work is a combination of the Qualitative Legal Research and Analytical Legal Research. This is because the work relied mainly upon non-numerical data sources relative to the topic at hand and after evaluating these sources, put forward a subjective view.

Migration Discourses in Twenty-First-Century Central European Literature and Culture. Introduction

Migration Discourses in Twenty-First-Century Central European Literature and Culture. Introduction

Hidden Stories

Mainstream discourses of migration and populist voices tend to be based on assumed distance between European subjects and migrant populations, disfiguring historical connections through time. This makes the excavation of Europe’s racist and imperial history particularly important as an intervention. The essay focuses on a bust collection in El Museo Canario in Gran Canaria, bought from France in the late nineteenth century, positioning the busts as folded objects in Amade M’charek’s sense. The unfolding exposes stories of an extensive global past where racism and imperialism are central components, in addition to not only hinting at the importance of race science in Europe, but also how areas on the margins of Europe could better insert themselves into larger narratives of modernization through their participation in scientific racism.

The Specifics of Modern Political Communication in Germany: the Fight For Lexicon

Abstract. This article highlights some aspects of modern political communication in Germany. Various linguistic and extralinguistic factors determine the relevance of the problem. The main purpose of the article is to look at the sphere of “language and politics” from the point of view of their interrelation, to demonstrate the power that the language of politics has over public opinion and the political situation in the country. To this end, the article describes the language of politics in terms of political linguistics, offers a classification of political vocabulary, and characterizes word–symbols, such as Liberty, Safety, Democracy and Terrorism as a reasonable way of expression and differentiation between words and political content. It is noted that political communication as an ideological discourse is aimed at the fight for power, while the main task of the language of politics is the fight for vocabulary, which ultimately is the fight for voters. The desire to influence the political preferences of voters in conditions of a worsening migration crisis in Germany dictates the need to consciously choose one’s words: positive words-banners, such as Peace, Fairness and Safety, to increase the importance of their position in public opinion, or to mobilize their own supporters; or negative words-labels, such as Terrorist, Islamist and Extremism, to reduce the importance of the position of the enemy or verbally attack one’s political opponent. Through the example of actual concepts of migration discourse, namely welcome culture, leading culture, farewell culture, the article examines the strategies and tactics through which political communication is a struggle for vocabulary, thus showing the correlation of language and policy.

A Missing Piece: The Absence of Discussion About Integration Policy in the Slovak Migration Discourse

In the current paper, we will explain how and why Slovak politicians have been largely unwilling to articulate the topic of migrant integration in recent years, even though up until 2015, international migration was at least a marginal topic of public debate in Slovakia. To this day, this topic remains mostly unexplored by both Slovak politicians and voters. Since migration policy is a synthesis of immigration, asylum, and integration policies, we assume that the migration discourse will be equivalently structured. Although the integration of foreigners has traditionally been an important part of migration policy in the larger world, we have found that this topic has been marginalised in Slovak public discourse, i.e. it is usually not part of the political discussion here. Integration is a marginal topic of this political discourse because Slovak politicians prefer to articulate migration as a threat to public order, identity, culture, and religion. Slovak politicians reject migration because they assume that migrants are unable or unwilling to integrate.

“Fortress Europe is an insult to the values of the EU”: The legitimation of migrant acceptance in the human security speech acts of Members of the European Parliament

AbstractScholars agree that securitized discourses mainly drive migration policy. However, to fully understand the migration discourse, it is necessary to look also at the discourse legitimating the acceptance of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Namely, how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) legitimate the potential acceptance of migrants in EU plenary debates within the human security speech acts that prevail in the European Parliament plenary debates. By exploring legitimation categories, I show that human security discourse might remain part of the exclusion process, similarly to other security concepts and discursive strategies. In other words, the results show that in human security speech acts, MEPs evoke the “language of exclusion practices” containing the victimhood trope and building the “hierarchy of vulnerability.” Moreover, MEPs' efforts to legitimize immigration in this way might be counterproductive. In particular, the article discusses whether attempts to elicit grand emotions such as pity or shame helps to attract the audience.

Foreigner, migrant, or refugee? How laypeople label those who cross borders

AbstractIn this article, we seek to exercise reflexivity in migration research by looking at the symbolic boundary work that sustains laypeople’s understanding and use of specific labels. We do so through a qualitative, cultural sociological investigation of migration attitudes in Czechia. We explore the labels foreigner, migrant, and refugee, commonly used labels in Czech migration discourse. In short, we argue that research participants rely on different grounds for boundary work, informed by available cultural repertoires, when characterizing foreigners, migrants, and refugees. While boundary work related to the label foreigner calls upon criteria of citizenship and perceived cultural closeness, the boundary work concerning the other two labels—migrant and refugee—involves the moral criteria of deservingness. Our study addresses three major shortcomings in migration studies. First, the opinions of laypeople influence public policies and approaches to migration, yet in-depth qualitative studies of migration attitudes are scarce. Second, even though migration attitudes shape the character of the receiving context for people who cross borders, how laypeople engage with labels remains understudied. Finally, we heed the call for a ‘reflexive turn’ in migration studies, arguing that researchers must remain reflexive, not only about labels they use, but also how such labels are understood and used by research participants.

Aging out: Place and sexuality

This paper explores LGBT retirees as agents of change who are renegotiating the terms of healthy aging in place and expanding our understanding of lifestyle and retirement migration. For the first time in history, a generation of self-identified lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender individuals have entered retirement. However, their subjective experiences have largely been glossed over in popular discourses of successful aging and migration in heteronormative society. This article explores why and how older LGBT people are choosing housing options to age “out of place” in order to support their sexual lives and identities. Examining the everyday experiences of these seniors—members of a double minority, both aged and LGBT—allows us to disrupt the idea of what healthy “aging in place” means and when it might actually be unhealthy. Employing standpoint theory pushes the analysis of marginalized voices to the fore and allows us to ask about these seniors’ subjective realities. What results is a reimagining of the aging landscape. Interview data from LGBT seniors who have migrated to LGBT naturally occurring retirement communities or LGBT-focused housing complexes in France, Sweden, and Germany are used to stretch our notions of wellbeing and aging in place for these diverse retirees. One finding is that for these LGBT seniors, disrupting social norms by aging out of place is not escapist or amenity-seeking, but is key to honoring their sexuality and aging process in a safe and supportive environment.

Event Cologne: Whiteness, Gender, and Germany's Ontological Insecurity

Years after the reported New Year's Eve sexual attacks in Cologne in 2015, the Event Cologne remains widely interpreted as a tipping point in the country's migration discourse. This article deconstructs the prima facie logics of the Event Cologne's body politics through a feminist, ontological security lens. It sees the Event Cologne not as a causal occurrence. Rather, it needs to be more fully understood as an outcome, circulating through Germany's deeply racialized, white, and gendered ontological insecurities. This article offers a feminist, intersectional, and antiracist analysis that scrutinizes the ontologically insecure German state-self through what I call two modes of Western re-belonging: Germany's unique proximity to US hypermasculine, liberal militarism, and the country's enduring, racialized, white citizenship regimes.

‘It was a departure of sorts’: glocal homes in recent short fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Efemia Chela, Chibundu Onuzo and Lesley Nneka Arimah

ABSTRACT This article takes off from two of the angles of contention found in critical responses to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and subsequent Atlanticist studies: asymmetries and exclusions along gender lines, and insufficient attention to the dynamics of contemporary global capital. It examines what gets articulated when recent African short fiction is approached via a frame centered on the location of home, gendered labour, sexual and reproductive economies, and the interrelation of the domestic and capitalism. In particular, it is informed by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s counter-heuristic to Gilroy, the Black Feminine Domestic. Gumbs’s attempt to make visible such a subject position and forms of labour prompts my focus on domestic workers and analogous figures, often migrant and low paid and sometimes found only at the edges of texts. I discuss Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’ (2014), Chibundu Onuzo’s ‘Sunita’ (2015), Lesley Nneka Arimah’s ‘Skinned’ (2019), and, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), the stories ‘Imitation,’ ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ and ‘On Monday of Last Week.’ Here the tropes of circulation and regimes of rationality identified by Gilroy find counterparts in the structuring of workforces, the reach of body and biopolitics, and discourses of national borders and migration. The lens of ‘women’s work’ permits an intersectional shift in and beyond Black Atlantic frames and the heteropatriarchal imagination, but the selected material and preoccupations here also seek to offer another opening on debates about, and genres of, ‘African’ writing.

Time and mobility/immobility: the chronopolitics of mobility and the temporalities of suffering and hope in situations of encampment

The article engages with the relationship between the chronopolitics of mobility and migrants’ narratives of the past, their present suffering, and hope for the future. Data collected through observation and repeat interviews with migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps in Lesvos, Greece, challenge the assumption that ‘time’ spent waiting in the camps by illegalized migrants represents a linear and singular metanarrative of the migrant in ‘temporal suspension’ from the ‘grid of modernity’. I suggest, that the concept of historical time allows for a critical analysis of illegalized migrants’ narratives of their past lives, their present suffering and future aspirations, through which they challenge the chronopolitics of control inherent in the current EU migration system. While such narratives might at first sight be understood as accepting a migration system based on suspension and gradual re-introduction into western historical and political time, they present a challenge to the exceptionality of western modernity and their suspension from it. I also argue, that narratives of ‘pasts’, ‘the present’ and hope for the ‘future’, challenge academic discourses of migration that centre on the notion of ‘bare life’, where historical and political time is suspended in the liminal space of the camp.

Climate migration, resilience and adaptation in the Anthropocene: Insights from the migrating Frafra to Southern Ghana

Climate-induced indigenous migration has become a radical adaptation vision in the Anthropocene. The article focuses on the problematic of representation of indigenous traditional knowledge and imagination in the Anthropocene, in Frafra ethnic group especially. The article does so by critically examining how indigenous traditional knowledge politicise anthropogenic climate change and migration conceived as a struggle between regimes of governing. It analyses alternative approaches to adaptation and resilience, from the Western scientific knowledge and modernist ontologies, often relying on the engagement of local communities, actively produced through the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality, understood as a relational outcome and contingent relation. I argue that indigenous traditional knowledge approaches to resilience and adaptation in the Anthropocene disrupt, contest and subvert modernist discourses of climate-induced migration. It is suggested that contemporary discourses of resilience and adaptation appear to be drawing to a close as it lacks an adequate agential, transformative and also opening up alternative possibilities.

The Criminalization of NGOs: Shifting the Blame (and the Gaze) from Immigrants to Rescuers

The ‘Refugee crisis’ has been accompanied by a radical shift of public attitudes toward NGOs operating in the southern Mediterranean, whose image has quickly turned from ‘saviors ofthe sea’ to ‘sea taxis’ by practices of re-contextualization of migration discourses. Less attention has been directed towards the ways such criminalization of solidarity affectedmigrant representation and identities in turn, especially on social media. This study aims to cast a new light on the discursive practices of criminalizing NGOs and their role in shaping the dichotomy ‘Us vs Them’. The case study focuses on Twitter as a privileged arena, where different categories of users are involved in the criminalization of NGOs, fostering the normalization of anti-immigration rhetoric, thus creating room for populist and sovereigntist ideologies. Based on a corpus composed of more than 800.000 tweets posted between 2017 and 2020, this study adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods including corpus linguistics and discursive strategies. Findings show that the NGO criminalization is part of the broader process of normalization of anti-immigration rhetoric, legitimizing restrictive migration policies, fostering the building of a sovereigntist political identity and neglecting immigrants’ and refugees’ own identities and rights. Specifically, results highlight a new articulation of the Us vs Them dichotomy where ‘Us’ is represented by the in-group, a new ‘Them’ is represented by the NGO and ‘Those’ is represented by migrants. The research output as a whole seems to consolidate a present and future trajectory regarding the political discourse on migration that is based on a progressive redefinition of the attributes of illegality/crime that shifts from migrants to rescuers.

Migration Discourse and the New Socially Constructed Meanings of the English Lingua Franca

After the 1990s, the mass arrival of immigrants in Europe transformed the phenomenon of migration from a benefit into a problem and opened the debate to issues of first aid, security, expulsion and rejection. Even today, migrants are no longer seen as a socio-economic resource to be protected and regulated, but as a potential social problem affecting areas such as the economy, health and national security. The paper deals with the linguistically relevant literature about migration discourse (MD) and the role of English as lingua franca in public discourse related to the migration phenomenon. The latter part examines some traditional English key terms used to represent migrants since their mass arrival in Europe after the 1990s and concludes with the current international debate conducted by the mass media and nongovernmental organizations on the new, socially constructed meanings that some migration terms have acquired in the English lingua franca over the past decades.

Securitising the future: Dystopian migration discourses in Poland and the Czech Republic

This paper presents findings of a comparative study carried out in Poland and the Czech Republic, which analysed the societal attitudes towards migration and migrants in Europe. Our research shows that the reaction to migration in Poland and the Czech Republic constitutes a reversed (bottom up) securitisation. Moreover, contrary to the majority of security challenges where the immediate threats are understood to be more dangerous than those placed in a distant future, when it comes to securitised migration, the threat projection increases the further into the future it is cast, and immediacy loses its potency as a catalyst. Societal discourses on migration foresee a dismal future which becomes more and more dystopian with the passing time.

(Mis)representing climate mobilities: lessons from documentary filmmaking

ABSTRACT Climate migration discourses tend to misrepresent the complex realities and experiences of people whose lives are impacted by climate change. All too often, the images conjured are of inevitable, massive, and permanent cross-border movements, contributing to apocalyptic and securitised climate imaginaries that cast migration as a threat to western societies. Climate mobilities scholarship contradicts these assumptions as inaccurate and damaging, with empirical research demonstrating that climate change affects peoples’ realities and experiences of mobilities in varied and multi-faceted ways. And yet, despite these well-established findings, overly simplistic climate migration narratives still abound. This poses a question: how can climate mobilities be better represented? To explore this question, I analyse six documentary films that portray island and coastal communities facing the possibility of migration. Methodologically, I use filmmaker interviews to contextualise the films’ production. Drawing on mobilities theory, I show that understanding the representation process (filmmaking) requires close attention not just to the mobilities of people being represented, but also of those engaged in representation (the filmmakers) and the subsequent circulation of the representation (film) itself. Whose mobilities are prioritised in this process is crucial. Ultimately, I argue that climate mobilities scholarship can learn from the filmmakers’ experiences.

Ambivalent borders and hybrid culture: The role of culture and exclusion in historical European discourses of migration

This article reflects on historical arguments about migration in conceptualisations of Europe, highlighting an ambivalent support of migration within Europe on the grounds of mutual cultural enrichment. There is a strong tradition, dating back to French and German eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Herder, Voltaire and Fichte, of citing cultural diversity, plurality and exchange to construct an idea of Europe. ‘Europolitanism’, the ideal of Europe as an open space of welcome movement and unprejudiced exchange, conceals, however, exclusionary tendencies: exchange has never been intended for all social groups. Contemporary theorisations of Europe, based ostensibly on cultural exchange, synthesis and plurality, have their roots in Romantic and Enlightenment thought, but then as now there are questions to be asked about participation in pan-European identity formation.

Changing from Visibility to Invisibility—An Intersectional Perspective on Mixedness in Switzerland and Morocco

In the context of intermarriage, mixedness can take different forms. Most often, it refers to a mix of class, religion, nationality, ethnicity or ‘race’ in a couple. In this article, I go beyond a separate analysis of categories, analyzing the interrelation of these factors. The article discusses how and under which circumstances mixed children become visible in Switzerland and Morocco using a comparative and intersectional approach to mixedness. Based on 23 biographical narrative interviews, I analyze three situations of stigmatization: racialization, language practices and othering due to religious affiliation. Stigmatization processes due to mixedness, it is argued, are a relational phenomenon depending not only on markers such as ‘race’, ethnicity and religion but also on their interplay with gender, class, language and biographical experiences. The results suggest that mixed individuals have found creative ways to navigate their visibility: they normalize their binational origin, look for alternative spaces of belonging, emphasize their ‘Swiss-ness’ or ‘Moroccan-ness’, use languages to influence their social positioning or acquire knowledge about their binational origin in order to confront stigmatizations. The study reveals further that processes of othering due to mixedness are not only an issue in ‘Western’ societies that look back on a long history of immigration and have pronounced migration discourses. Even in Morocco, a country where immigration has so far been a marginal phenomenon, the importance of social hierarchies for the positioning of people of binational origin is evident.