New Writing on Migration and Mobilities

This ongoing blog series brings together MMB posts about new books and other publications that focus on migration and mobilities. Some of these posts are part of other MMB series (such as Race, Nation and Migration) while others stand alone, introducing new thinking on a particular aspect of human and non-human movement.

  • Looking back to ‘The Postcolonial Age of Migration’: a post-pandemic view
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Ranabir Samaddar. My book The Postcolonial Age of Migration was published in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic raged in India and elsewhere. Global mobility had screeched to a halt, as had mobility within India. Locked down in my house when I received a copy, […]
  • Researching Western privilege in Dubai: a conversation with Saba A. Le Renard
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series This is an edited version of an interview with Saba A. Le Renard in Jadaliyya* about their recent book Western Privilege. Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2021). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write the book? Saba A. Le Renard (SLR): When I was […]
  • The bifurcated migration lexicon and trend-defying trajectories
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Rose Jaji. The migration lexicon has consolidated itself around an either/or rather than both-and schematic in which categories resulting from a binary classification of regions and countries have acquired unquestioned normativity. This normativity is evident in what can be termed a regionalised division of […]
  • Organising against fear: migrant nannies and domestic workers during COVID
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Maud Perrier Migrant nannies and domestic workers were largely absent from mainstream feminist commentary during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as from public discussion of childcare. In the UK broadsheets, most of the media coverage of the childcare crisis during this time was dominated […]
  • Mobility and mobilization – narrating injustices
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Hager Ben Driss. Stephen Greenblatt defines ‘mobilizers’ as ‘agents, go-betweens, translators, or intermediaries’ (Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto p. 251) and contends that their function as contact facilitators should be included in mobility studies. This concept of mobilization serves as an ethical lever of […]
  • Ordinary: a new approach to work in migration research
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Dora-Olivia Vicol. In the world of mobility research, scholars have long cast a critical look at work. In most immigration regimes in the Global North, worker status is what is used to distinguish between those who are allowed to migrate and those who […]
  • Forced labour in supply chains: missing links between industrial and sexual labour
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Rutvica Andrijasevic. I was in the midst of fieldwork researching the working conditions of migrant workers in the electronics industry in Central and Eastern Europe when the press ran the story about Serbian workers working and living in slavery-like conditions in Slovakia. Various articles […]
  • Addressing discomfort: the politics and ethics of representation in qualitative research
    By the Critical Methodologies Collective. The Politics and Ethics of Representation in Qualitative Research (2021), published in July by Routledge, draws on experiences from nine different PhD projects. These have been brought together by our Critical Methodologies Collective to offer insights into the politics and ethics of representation for researchers working on justice struggles. Moments of […]
  • Maritime mobility and literary culture: ‘Hamlet’ off the coast of Sierra Leone
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Laurence Publicover. In 1607 three East India Company (EIC) ships set off on the company’s third voyage, aiming to break into the lucrative spice trade dominated by Portugal for the previous century. As the first to reach mainland India, this voyage has clear […]
  • Britain as the spoils of empire
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Nadine El-Enany. My parents travelled from Egypt to Britain in 1977, moving from London to Exeter, a city in the South West of England, in 1978. For my parents, Exeter was a place they felt fortunate to have found, an idyll […]
  • Intimate state encounters: Brexit, European Roma and contested home-lands
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Rachel Humphris. Brexit and the UK’s relationship with the European Union foregrounds questions of identity, nationhood and who is included or excluded. For those identified as ‘Roma’ these are perennial questions as purported ‘European citizenship’ made little difference to their position […]
  • Racism and the UK’s immigration system
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Maya Goodfellow. ‘Hard Brexit,’ Labour’s Andy Burnham warned a few months after the EU referendum result in 2016, would ‘turn Britain into a place it has never been: divided, hostile, narrow-minded.’ This is a theme that has persisted since the initial […]
  • Queer liberalisms and marginal mobility – special issue and interview series
    New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series By Mengia Tschalaer. To live a life in fear of violence, incarceration, torture, excommunication and isolation is a reality for many lesbian, gay, trans*, bi, intersex and non-binary persons worldwide. Homosexuality is criminalized in 77 countries, out of which seven apply the death penalty. According […]
  • Deporting Black Britons: mobility and race-making in the life stories of criminalised ‘deportees’
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Luke de Noronha. My recently published book, Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (2020, Manchester University Press), traces the life stories of people who have been exiled from their homes in Britain. The four men who feature most […]
  • Moving difference: Brazilians in London
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Angelo Martins Junior. Portuguese version here. The freedom to move from place to place is a privilege in today’s world, and so ideas about human mobility and human difference are necessarily interwoven. When white people from the global north move […]
  • National sovereignty and postcolonial racism
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Nandita Sharma. A focus on migration, mobility and ideas of ‘race’ are crucial aspects of nationalist thought and practice. Indeed, today, racism operates through nationalism. Yet, while racism has been largely delegitimised, nationalism has not. The delegitimisation of racism does […]
  • MMB good reads on race, nation and migration
    A new blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. Introduced by Julia O’Connell Davidson and Bridget Anderson. Not so long ago, many liberal thinkers in countries of the global north were comfortable narrating the story of liberal societies as a romance in which enlightened heroes gradually overcame the forces of barbarism. It was a […]
  • Home and sense of belonging among Iraqi Kurds in the UK
    By Ali Zalme. All too often we are forced into assumptions and caricatures of a particular group that fail to expose nuanced experiences of the members of that group. My new book, Home and Sense of Belonging among Iraqi Kurds in the UK (Lexington Books, 2020),is an effort to voice out lived experiences of an […]
  • Are transnational marriages bad for integration?
    By Sarah Spencer The belief that marriage partners from less developed countries are bad for ‘integration’ is firmly held by European policy makers. With pressure to curb immigration, that concern has conveniently justified raising the bar for spouses to enter. Marriage Migration and Integration (2020) interrogates that assumption with substantial evidence from an ESRC-funded study […]