Migration Narratives Research Articles

Redefining the Narrative of Youth Migration in Nigeria; Empowering Local Communities for Sustainable Development and Thriving Future

Redefining the Narrative of Youth Migration in Nigeria; Empowering Local Communities for Sustainable Development and Thriving Future

Mental health among older Bhutanese with a refugee life experience: A mixed-methods latent class analysis study.

There are disparities in the mental health of refugee populations compared to individuals who have not experienced forced migration. It is important to identify individuals with a refugee life experience who are most in need of mental health care and prioritize their engagement in services. The objectives of this convergent mixed-methods study are to quantitatively identify the association between exposure to pre- and postresettlement traumas and stressors and mental health among older adults with a refugee life experience, qualitatively identify typologies of narratives of forced migration, and integrate findings to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between trauma and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Study participants were Bhutanese with a refugee life experience living in a metropolitan area in New England (United States). We used quantitative surveys to identify exposures to traumas and symptoms of PTSD. We used latent class analysis to identify subgroups of trauma exposure and association with symptoms of PTSD. A subset of individuals participated in qualitative interviews. Narrative thematic analysis was used to explore typologies of life history narratives. Quantitatively, we identified four classes of patterns of trauma exposure throughout the refugee life trajectory. These classes were associated with current symptoms of PTSD. Qualitatively, we identified four narrative types that indicate participants interpreted and made sense of their life trajectories in a variety of ways. Integration of findings indicate that caution is needed in identifying individuals in need of mental health services and the best approach for interventions that promote psychosocial well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Japanese Diaspora and the Narratives of Migrants：The Case of Australia and Diasporic Literature

The overseas emigration of Japanese citizens has been on the rise in the last three decades, reaching at the level of 1.34 million in 2021 (MOFA 2022). While the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in its downturn, the number of Japanese citizens who obtained permanent residence overseas continued to increase, hitting a record high of 537,662 in 2021 (MOFA 2022). This article examines the factors behind this growing overseas emigration of Japanese citizens, particularly looking at its flows to Australia, which is now the second most popular destination for Japanese permanent residents. Based on the narratives of 62 research participants, this article will present the basic ideal types of Japanese emigrants and examine the themes that appeared prominently in their emigration decision-making, including the acquisition of global experience, work-life balance, gender inequality, aversion of disaster/environmental and long-term economic risks, and political concerns. It will also discuss the ways in which Japanese emigration and the diversifying experiences of Japanese citizens have impacted Japanese literature so far and how the growing presence of ‘global nomads’ moving across multiple borders is likely to enrich the Japanese literature in the future by challenging the existing understanding of “Japaneseness” and the meaning of migration.

From Narcoliterature to Narratives of Migration, or the Limits of Narrating Violence in Contemporary Mexican Literature

In the mid-2000s, the war on drugs became the dominant discourse in public debates about violence in Mexico. This discourse allowed the emergence and consolidation of narcoliterature as one of the main modes of representation to make sense of the widespread rise of violence in Mexico. As critics have pointed out, the inauguration of the cultural and political imaginary brought about by the war on drugs provided the Mexican state with the representational coordinates to justify the militarization of the country and to rationalize it as the only possible and logical strategy to confront the ever-elusive cartels. Within this context, in this article, I take the political and aesthetic coordinates characteristic of narcoliterature to argue that recent Mexican narratives on or about undocumented migration engage with violence within the representational coordinates and imperatives of the war on drugs as their horizon of ideological intelligibility. This, I argue, dehistoricizes the migrant struggle in Mexico, disconnecting it from the social and political contexts that intensified the forcible displacement of historically subordinated communities in Central America and Mexico. In this sense, I suggest that cultural and literary criticism must engage with contemporary migration narratives in Mexico as a space to reflect not only on the ongoing crises of governance and sovereignty in Mexico but, more importantly, to reveal how displacement, forced migration, and the precarization of life and labor are central to and constitutive to neoliberalism.

“Labor Migrants”, “High-Skilled Migrants”, “Students”, “Refugees”, “French Citizens”? Migrants’ Narratives and Experiences of Categorization in a Biographical and Historical Perspective

This article explores categorizations of migration from a biographical and historical perspective. By comparing biographical narratives of migrants who arrived in France during two historical periods: in the 1960s-1970s (in the context of labor migration) and in the 2010s (in the context of student, high-skilled and refugee migration), it analyzes the impact of categorizations on migrants’ life courses as well as the subjective meaning migrants themselves attribute to these categories. The article shows that counter-intuitively, despite their differences, the presented case studies share a strong feeling of social downgrading linked to the interplay between sexism and racism.

The First Immigrants: The Migratory Roots of Biblical Identity

In order to engage more faithfully with the reality of migration in the modern world and the challenges of immigration in the United States today, we take a closer look at perspectives on immigration in Scripture. In the stories of their ancestors, the authors of Genesis describe their own origins as migratory, thereby claiming for themselves and their people an immigrant identity. To understand these migration narratives clearly, we construct a new set of lenses that view Israel’s ancestors as sedentary residents of Canaan—not nomads—who cross administrative borders and encounter different cultures, who are named immigrants ( gērîm)—not sojourners, foreigners, or aliens—by the authors in Genesis, and who experience the same kinds of crises—especially climate change—as modern immigrants who are forced to leave their countries of origin and relocate in destination countries.

Mapping transnational lives: patterns of dislocation and reorientation in contemporary carto-graphic memoirs

ABSTRACT This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito’s Swallows (Part I), and Pia Valentini’s Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell 2007; Norment 2012), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic processes of autobiographical (re)orientation, drawing, storytelling, and intellectual reflection. Dominant narratives of Italian migration redeem the struggle and shame of migration through individual success, upward mobility, and racial ‘whitening’. These three works challenge stereotypical representations of Italian migration, and Italian hyphenated identities, focusing instead on geographical, historical and autobiographical fragments that come together on the page to sketch provisional and fragile, yet emotionally and intellectually powerful patterns. Such patterns reveal histories and geographies of racism, class exploitation, violence, trauma, but also histories of physical, existential, cultural, linguistic and intellectual resistance, exchange, and creativity. Each of these memoirs locate Italian migrants and their descendants at the intersection of traumatic histories and geographies of nationalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and class exploitation. In doing so, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between transnational histories and individual lives.

Migration narratives in Northern Triangle, Mexican and US media from 1999 to 2019

AbstractThis study conceptualizes the mediated discussions of migration in Central America as narratives, arguing for the need to examine the broader contours of policy‐related migration reporting across time. Using machine learning and text mining analyses, combined with qualitative narrative analysis, the study examines 53,441 news articles from 17 US, Mexican and Northern Triangle media outlets from 1999 to 2019, tracing and critiquing the shifts in coverage. Findings suggest that all three media systems generally align in their depiction of the scene, key agents and acts regarding migration; however, US narratives increasingly diverge from Northern Triangle and Mexican narratives regarding the purpose and instruments by which migration occurs, with US value claims narrowing over time emphasizing border security. This narrative trajectory within US media ignores migrants' determination and underlining rationales for migration, pushing them to take increasingly dangerous means to migrate to the USA and exacerbating the situation for all parties.

Accessible Stories within Mediascapes

This article presents the first steps in the investigation of the potential for digital storytelling and digital museums to be used as instruments for access, as enablers of epistemic and poietic agency. Digital storytelling and migration museums are used as a case study to explore in what ways digital storytelling impacts meaning-making processes performed by migrants, allowing them to become active creators and disseminators of their own experiences. Through the combination of corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, and lexical semantic analysis, an ad-hoc comparable corpus of migrant narratives in English and in Italian was cross-examined in order to scrutinise the conceptual categories activated in these stories. The mixed-methods analysis led to the identification of the most common lexico-semantic features forming the knowledge frames of the experiential world of migrants. Results show that each national narrative makes use of its own grammar and lexico-semantic domains, a set of semantic and syntactic patterns associated with the production of stories of migration within the context of transmedia textual subtypes. These domains are strategic, as they give access to marginalised stories within digital museum settings. Lay summary Adopting the perspective of accessibility studies, digital storytelling is interpreted as a series of instruments for access, as an enabler of epistemic and poietic agency. That is, digital storytelling empowers people to express their voice and become active creators and disseminators of their own experiences. In order to investigate the potential of digital storytelling as a tool for access, we created a comparable corpus made of migrant narratives in English and in Italian spread across museum platforms. Then we cross-examined the corpus through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies in order to examine the conceptual categories activated in these stories. More specifically, we analysed and identified which linguistic strategies have been employed by the storytellers to inform the audience, what knowledge frames have been adopted to tell their experiences and expectations, and what similarities or differences exist among stories told by migrants who have settled down in different parts of the world. Showing that each national narrative makes use of its own semantic and syntactic patterns, our results support the idea of digital storytelling as an access enabler and digital museums as novel environments which jointly empower people with the tools and conditions to take a proactive role.

Nowhere to belong: Migration narratives in Eeb Allay Oo! (2019) and Gamak Ghar (2019)

This article analyses the narratives of migration in the films Eeb Allay Oo! and Gamak Ghar which also incidentally speak to a moment in India during the pandemic when the precarious lives of migrants working in the informal sector took centre stage in the public discourse. While Eeb Allay Oo! follows the life of a migrant unable to find suitable work till he is recruited as a monkey repeller in central Delhi, Gamak Ghar introspects the idea of home in the filmmaker’s own village near Darbhanga in Bihar when various family members leave it to work and live elsewhere. The article addresses these films through an interdisciplinary lens of migration studies and cinema studies and as alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema of the country in terms of aesthetics and the circular journeys of the filmmakers themselves.

Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković, Thede Kahl, and Biljana Sikimić, eds. Boyash Studies: Researching “Our People”

Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković, Thede Kahl, and Biljana Sikimić, eds. <i>Boyash Studies: Researching “Our People”</i>

Magadha to Chittagong Buddhist migration: the colonizer-colonized contestation over Arakanese and Bengali ethnic belonging

ABSTRACT Late medieval Mughal sources accuse the Arakanese of incest and label them as ‘Maga.’ The Mughal use of ‘Maga’ echoes its previous application: pre-Islamic Persians were accused of incest and called ‘Maga.’ Colonial officials, however, redefined ‘Maga’ as a derivative of Magadha (historical Buddhist homeland in North India) and argued that the term originally referred to Barua Buddhists living in the Chittagong plains as the latter’s ancestors had arrived in Chittagong from Magadha via Arakan. This colonial ‘Maga-to-Magadha’ narrative suggested that the Baruas were an offshoot of the Arakanese although they have lived in the plains. It explained an anomaly in the colonial Chittagong hills-plains division. With an analysis of the Baruas’ writings, this paper argues that the Baruas themselves employed the same ancestral migration narrative to distance themselves from Arakanese ethnicity and claimed Bengali ethnic belonging. The Baruas’ claim has aligned them with Bengali nationalism but seems insufficient to challenge emerging Bangladeshi nationalism.

Psychology of home and Ukrainian migrants’ socio-psychological adaptation abroad

Study goal and methods. Study of the course of socio-psychological adaptation of Ukrainian refugees abroad, their perceptions of home and host country, as well as intergroup interaction between Ukrainian refugees and the autochthonous population. The research was conducted within the framework of the scientific approach to intergroup interaction as the dynamics of conscious and unconscious. Case study of narratives of Ukrainian migrants as a form of representation of individual meanings and thematic construction of experience was conducted. Conclusions. A structured life world that integrates the experience associated with the evacuation of refugees from Ukraine and the new stage of life abroad, based on the construction of personal experience into meaningful event blocks, is a prerequisite for successful socio-psychological adaptation and acculturation in the host country. During integration into the host society migrants learn new relevant communicative and social roles. Group support provided to refugees by other Ukrainians in a similar situation as well as by representatives of the host country and volunteers is of great importance. The limitations of the study are related to the situational nature of narrative interviews, the variability of events and meanings that are significant for the individual at the moment. Prospects for further research include the study of age-specific features of socio-psychological adaptation abroad and the temporal dynamics of this process. Practical Importance. Data from the original descriptive study of the socio-psychological processes of acculturation indicate the importance of group support and experience construction in overcoming stress and can be used in the provision of psychosocial support to Ukrainian military migrants

Tensions between norms of everyday narrating and legal narrating

AbstractContemporary asylum laws challenge the narratives of migrants and legal professional teams. Struggles arise in requirements to tell the right story defined by legal norms while storytelling in everyday life relies on sociocultural norms. Professionals working with socially and legally vulnerable populations, as in education and asylum cases, can bridge that gap if we understand narrating as a relational process with credibility and coherence developing over time in terms of the clients’ experience and institutional expectations. This paper presents dynamic storytelling methodology to guide such a process, applied successfully with a Roma community seeking inclusion in public education and used to interpret two unsuccessful asylum cases. Drawing on those examples, we conclude by proposing a socio-legal framework for collaborative lawyering in research on clinical legal training. The goal is a narrative process based on legal actors’ awareness that truth acquisition is a human sense-making process framed by human rights norms.

The Fabrics of Home: Remembering the Indo-European Repatriation in Contractpensions-Djangan Loepah!

Abstract When a large group of Indo-Europeans had to repatriate to a country many had never set foot in, they set in motion an unforeseen culture of remembrance. The subsequent narratives of forced migration – or rather narratives of belonging – deal with memories of home. Whereas first-generation repatriates predominantly used literature to document their memories, the second-generation remembers the past in the cinematic field of the cultural imaginary. Focusing on the documentary Contractpensions by a second-generation Indo-European, this article explores representations of the repatriate Indo-European experience and the relation between the current country in which they reside and the homeland of earlier generations. Of particular significance are the tensions between geographical attachment, their repatriate identity, and a brittle Dutch nationality. The article argues that the idea of home is central to these tensions, and that place, belonging and citizenship are the threads of home that weave Indo-European repatriate culture and identity into being.

Migration Crisis and Conspiracy in Kazuo Ishiguro

ABSTRACT Migration and its crises constitute an insistent theme in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction, where – as in real recent history – the politics of migration have a dangerously close relationship with conspiracy narratives. At the heart of such narratives lies the fetishised ideal of the organic, original home and “homeland”: conspiracist paranoia is bound up in desire for epistemological security, responding to the traumatic rifts that migrations expose in a world torn between resurgent nationalisms and fraught globalisations. This essay explores how Ishiguro’s characters register a series of psycho-cultural functions for conspiracy theory that are fundamental to modern and contemporary migration crises, their causes, and their brutal consequences. I argue that Ishiguro’s interrogation of his own protagonists’ narratives of migration alongside international crisis, in novels including A Pale View of Hills, The Remains of the Day, and When We Were Orphans, forms a subtle intervention against the power of conspiricist thought.

Temporal statelessness and the oppressive liminality of perpetually unfulfilled hope: An examination of waiting in Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue

Narratives of migration can be without movement. When people are suddenly internally displaced, for example, they become non-citizens in their former home countries and are unable to move, much less leave. In instances such as these, we suggest that it may be a temporal – rather than spatial – displacement that has occurred. In so doing, we examine one aspect of temporal displacement: the perpetual state of waiting as a potential tool of bureaucratic control. This is a tool that operates along an axis of hope and anxiety in what may be an attempt to keep people exactly where they already are. This state of waiting appears throughout Al-Tabuur (The Queue), a translated and fictionalized novel written by Egyptian author Basma Abdel Aziz. As illustrated here, Aziz’s novel challenges notions that migration inherently involves progress, and instead shows what can happen when both time and movement seemingly come to a still.

Vietnamese refugee journeys and the fallacy of certainty

Vietnamese diasporic refugee narratives critically engage images of helicopter rescues and crowded boats that saturate American-mediated memories of war’s aftermath. From a critical refugee studies perspective, Yến Lê Espiritu links war to displacement through these images to define the United States as a ‘militarized refuge’. For Mimi Nguyen, arrival initiates a ‘gift of freedom’ that names the indebtedness of the refugee to the state. In their critical engagements, arrival initiates debt for militarized refugees. To further their work, I problematize the celebration of arrival with what I call the fallacy of certainty. To dismantle the certainty of arrival, I examine expressions of what Vinh Nguyen calls ‘refugeetude’ in depictions of refugee journeys by Ocean Vuong, G. B. Tran, Nam Le and Matt Huynh. Employing Espiritu’s method of ‘critical juxtapositioning’, I engage Édouard Glissant’s relationality of the abyss and the opacity of the open boat to contextualize forced migration narratives within a longue durée of imperialism that Aníbal Quijano calls coloniality. Ending with Long Bui’s discussion of a postmemory generation of Vietnamese diasporic artists and writers’ use of performativity, I show how they forward critical refugee studies when they imaginatively return to the journey, articulating relationalities that cross oceans and temporalities.

"Everyone Has Their Story": Intergroup Dialogue's Potential to Cultivate Connection Through the Sharing of Migration Narratives.

Immigrant-origin (I-O) youth face increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric in the USA, including in their schools. School-based intergroup dialogue programming may help I-O youth and their peers build a more inclusionary culture. We qualitatively examined how I-O youth and their peers experienced a week-long school-wide intergroup dialogue program that aimed to foster connection among participants at a Northeastern high school. Participants' (N=159) experience in the program were analyzed using post-program reflections. Participants were 53% female and 74% underclassmen; 59% Latinx, 14% Black, 13% multiracial, 9% White, and 5% Asian and Middle Eastern; generationally, 54% identified as second-generation immigrants, 38% as non-immigrant origin, and 8% as first-generation. Participation in the program produced mixed results. For many, participation led to a greater sense of connection; youth reported that they learned about their peers, the immigrant experience, and sometimes, themselves. Connection was especially fostered among the dominant demographic groups in the school: second-generation and Latinx youth. Learning about others was less likely to cultivate connections when participants could not relate their own experiences, and at times even made participants feel more different from their peers. Intergroup dialogue has the potential to foster connection when participants are able to relate across experiences.

Between Nostalgia and Nationalism: Emigrants from the Habsburg Empire in South America

This article offers four migration narratives from three states—Brazil, Argentina, and Chile—including biographic approaches and group identities, cultural nostalgia and nationalist resentment. The divergent trajectories of the Dalmatian business tycoons Nicolás Mihanovich in Argentina and Pascual Baburizza in Chile, the celebration of inter-ethnic Austrian-ness in Ijuí (Brazil) vs. the symbolic construction of a “second Poland” by Polish immigrants in Paraná (Brazil) seek to open different windows into the highly complex panorama of Austrian-Hungarian emigration to Latin America. Although approximately 300,000 Habsburg subjects sought there their new homeland, the topic remains underresearched.