Updates on the IMISCOE Book Series

Decided Return Migration: Emotions, Citizenship, Home and Belonging in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Author: Aida Ibričević

This open access book creates conceptual links between political emotions, citizenship, home and belonging. The book describes that, in the case of decided return and reintegration to a post-conflict society and a fragmented state, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, the returnees do not conceptualize the emotional dimension of their BiH citizenship as home and belonging as this citizenship does not make them feel safe and secure. Instead, “feeling at home” is found in family, place and time, while belonging is categorized as ethnic, religious, relational, landscape, linguistic, and economic. The emotional dimension of the home state citizenship is constituted through a wide spectrum of emotions, ranging from anger, frustration, fear, guilt, shame, disappointment, nostalgia, powerlessness, to patriotic love, pride, defiance, joy, happiness and hope. This book provides a valuable resource to students and scholars of migration and diaspora studies, as well as political scientists, human geographers and anthropologists.

Taking Vulnerabilities to Labour Exploitation Seriously: A Critical Analysis of Legal and Policy Approaches and Instruments in Europe

Author: Letizia Palumbo

This Open Access book intends to contribute to the debate on migrant labour exploitation by exploring the extent to which the EU and the European countries provide a standard for protecting migrant workers. It moves from a socio-legal and theoretical perspective and builds on critical studies on vulnerability, exploitation, trafficking and migrant labour regimes – along with relevant feminist theories, including theories on social reproduction – while also drawing on extensive fieldwork. By mobilising the concept of ‘situational vulnerabilities’, the book critically investigates the assemblage and interaction of factors creating and amplifying migrant workers’ vulnerabilities to exploitation in the key sectors of agriculture and domestic work. The aim is to highlight how situations of vulnerability to exploitation are generated and exacerbated by relevant legal and policy frameworks, underlining and questioning the tensions, continuities, and ambiguities between different regimes, such as the regimes regulating labour migration and those intended to combat severe exploitation. While at the national level, the focus is on relevant Italian legal and policy instruments and approaches, the book also offers a comparative look at those adopted in the UK.

Migration and Cities: Conceptual and Policy Advances

Editors: Anna Triandafyllidou, Amin Moghadam, Melissa Kelly, Zeynep Şahin-Mencütek

This Open Access book brings together different perspectives on migration and the city that are usually discussed separately to show the special character of the urban context as a territorial and political space where people coexist, whether by choice or necessity. Drawing on heterogeneous situations in cities in different world regions (including Europe, North America, the Middle East, South, Southeast and East Asia and the Asia Pacific) contributions to this volume examine how migration and the urban context interact in the twenty-first century. The book is structured in four parts. The first looks at cities as hubs of cultural creativity, exploring the many dimensions of cultural diversity and identity as they are negotiated in the urban context. The second focuses on what lies outside the large urban centres of today, notably suburbs, while the third part engages with migration and diversity in small and mid-sized cities, many of which have adopted strategies to welcome growing numbers of migrants. Last but not least, the fourth part looks at the challenges and opportunities that asylum-seeking and irregular migration flows bring to cities. By providing a variety of empirical cases based on various world regions, this book is a valuable resource for researchers, students and policymakers.

Migrants with a Precarious Status: Evolving Approaches of European Cities

Authors: Sarah Spencer, Ilker Ataç, Zach Bastick, Adrienne Homberger, Simon Güntner, Maren Kirchhoff, Marie Mallet-Garcia

This Open Access book is an exploration of city responses to migrants with precarious status in Europe. It provides new evidence and analysis from research on three cities in Austria, Germany and the UK: Vienna, Frankfurt and Cardiff. The book explores strategies and services of municipal authorities toward precarious migrants and their cooperation with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in service provision. It focuses on healthcare, education, housing and access to advice; and particular attention is given to the situation of women. The book develops the concept of precarity in relation to migration status, and of horizontal governance arrangements within municipal authorities. It explores the tension between exclusion and inclusion of migrants who have limited rights of access to welfare services and contributes evidence on the factors shaping municipal policymaking, as well as on the framing of rationales for providing access to essential services.

Migration and Home- IMISCOE Short Reader

Authors: Mastoureh Fathi, Caitríona Ní Laoire

This Open Access Short Reader offers an intersectional perspective on the meaning of home in migration. The book provides a pathway through existing scholarship on home and migration, exploring how intersectional power relations and transnational migration regimes are felt, experienced, lived and navigated by migrants, who are differently positioned, in the making and imagining of home. The meanings associated with home are composed of the interrelation of places, spaces, people, social relations, materialities, emotions and temporalities. These multiple aspects highlight the complexities inherent in the idea of home, which come to the fore particularly when one moves location. Migration and Home explores these issues by focusing on specific key aspects of home in migration: home and gender; home and age; home and materiality; and home and migration status, class and race. It proposes the concept of structural im/possibilities as a framework for understanding the power relations and structures that shape where, when and for whom home in migration is more, or less, possible.

Cultural Change in Post-Migrant Societies: Re-Imagining Communities Through Arts and Cultural Activities

Editor: Wiebke Sievers

This Open Access book links the artistic and cultural turn in migration studies to the larger struggle for narrative and cultural change in European migration societies. It proposes theoretical and methodological approaches that highlight how ideas of change expressed in artistic and cultural practices spread and lead to wider cultural change. The book also looks at the slow processes of change in large cultural institutions that emerged at a time when culture was nationalised. It explains how individual and group activities can have an impact beyond their immediate surroundings. Finally, the book discusses how migration researchers have cooperated with arts and cultural producers and used artistic means to increase the effect of their research on the wider public. As such, the book provides a great resource for graduate students and researchers in the social sciences and the humanities who have an interest in migration studies and want to move beyond interpreting the world towards changing it.

Migrations in the Mediterranean- IMISCOE Regional Reader

Editors: Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Ibrahim Awad

This Open Access Regional Reader describes population movement circulating within the Mediterranean area, for any reason or from any region, be it European, African, Asian or originating from any of the Mediterranean shores. It showcases a plurality of approaches to and applications of Mediterranean migration, contributing to a regional approach to migration studies, thereby defending this regional approach by scaling Mediterranean migration issues. This book covers a large set of questions related to Mediterranean migrations to the migration research agenda, such as market and economy, politics and policies, super-diversity and intersectionality, media, society, welfare and the environment five main parts: Geo-political Mediterranean Relations, Governance, Policies and Politics, Mobility drivers and Agency, Cities, History and Social Transformations, and Economy and Labour Markets. This Regional Reader provides an interesting read to scholars, researchers, but also policymakers and civil society organizations’ high representatives, international foundations and institutions interested in linking the Mediterranean and migration.

Migration and Identity through Creative Writing Stories: Strangers to Ourselves

Editors: Alka Kumar, Anna Triandafyllidou

This Open Access book brings together storytelling and self-narrative, creative writing and narrative enquiry to explore a variety of topics in migration from an experiential lens. The volume is hybrid and multi-genre as it contains both scholarly chapters grounded in academic perspectives, as well as personal essays and creative non-fiction. In addition to critical reflections on key migration topics and concepts – like, identity and diversity, integration and agency, transnationalism and return – the scholarly chapters also propose a particular methodology for ‘workshopping’ migration narratives, and writing about (personal) lived experiences through iterations of scientific reflection, narrative enquiry, and creative imagination. The book explores the potential of a new conceptual paradigm and methodological process to learn more, and also `differently,’ about the migration experience. Finally, this volume asks a bigger question too – how do we define the boundaries of research; is it possible to entirely separate the spatial, temporal and methodological parameters in which projects are developed and pursued; and how can the specifics of these multiple contexts contribute to shaping the knowledge being produced?

Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London

Author: Julius-Cezar MacQuarie

This book captures the hidden labour of migrant nightworkers in 24/7 London. It argues that late capitalism normalises nightwork, yet refuses to recognise the associated problems, from lack of decent working conditions to the seizure of the workers’ private time for self-development, family and social life. The book shows how the articulation of nightworkers’ subjectivities and socialities happens at the intersection between migration, precarity and nightwork, and traces how each of these dimensions magnifies the lived experience of the others. It further reveals that any possibilities for cooperation or solidarity in the workplace between migrant nightworkers become fragile and secondary to their survival of the night shift. It also elucidates the mechanisms that hinder cohesion between vulnerable groups placed temporally and socially on a different par to the mainstream societies. As such, this book is an excellent resource for labour regulators, experts and student researchers in migration, work and gender.

Migration and International Relations- IMISCOE Short Reader

Author: Catherine Wihtol de Wenden

This Open Access Short Reader investigates how migration has become an increasingly important issue in international relations since the turn of the 21st century. It investigates specific aspects of this migration diplomacy such as double citizenship or bilateral agreements on border controls which can become important tools for bargain or pressure. This short reader also discusses the intersections between migration and international relations concerning issues of global governance such as conflicts and refugees, development and mobility, or environmental migration. The book thereby shows the extent of bargaining involved in migration and international relations, the so-called “soft diplomacy of migrations” as seen in the EU/Turkish agreement on borders in 2016, or the EU negotiations with Maghreb or Sub-Saharan countries on read missions against development programs and visas. As such, this reader provides a must-read to students, academics, researchers and policymakers and everyone who wants to learn more about the international relations aspects of migration governance.

Migration in South Asia- IMISCOE Regional Reader

Editor: S. Irudaya Rajan

This Open Access Regional Reader provides a contemporary look at the emerging challenges and issues facing South Asian migration amidst Covid-19 and discusses a framework for a sustainable and cooperative migration from and within the region, which will impact both the economic and regional development of South Asia. The book draws a focus on this area through an interdisciplinary and holistic lens and follows the three broad areas of migration studies in South Asia: Governance and mobility, Family, health and demography, and Forced migration. It thereby covers a number of issues from South Asian countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and the Maldives. This book is a valuable resource for those who want to understand the dynamics of migration from the largest migrant-sending region in the world and one which will determine the shape of global migration patterns in the future.