A new volume edited by Professor Bridget Anderson, MMB, University of Bristol
Join us for ‘Rethinking Migration’ – MMB Online Book Launch on Wednesday 14 May at 3-4pm (UK time)
Paperback and open access eBook available now!!
Humans have always moved, but across the world ‘migration’ has become a major policy, political and media concern. How can we understand human movement without positioning ‘the migrant’ as a problem?
Rethinking Migration (published by Bristol University Press) is an interdisciplinary collection from Migration Mobilities Bristol that presents a new approach to migration and movement. It explores mobility beyond the human and across time, from the movement of soil in the Middle Ages to contemporary cow passports. It also examines the histories of international borders, how they are expressed in music and film and intertwined with the politics of race and nation. Read together the contributions demonstrate that borders are not only legal constructions but are endlessly socially and imaginatively in the making.
Tracing the connections between migration and other forms of movement reveals how movement is inescapably political and the book gives new insights into our histories and contemporary politics. It is an invitation to imagine, think and act across disciplines, institutions, and, of course, national borders, to undo separations and build connections, not only in the field of migration, but across the multiple exclusions and separations that divide our contemporary world.
Visit the Bristol University Press website to order the paperback and download the open access eBook – and click here for a 50% discount code, available until 1st June.
Read comments on Rethinking Migration from the book launch in Bristol, March 2025, by Maya Goodfellow (City University London) and two of the contributing authors, Laurence Publicover and Brid Brennan. And watch a recording of the online launch in May 2025, with comments from colleagues in Brazil, Canada and Germany along with reflections from two other contributing authors, here.
Contents
Chapter 1
Introduction: rethinking migration – challenging borders, citizenship and race
Bridget Anderson, Migration Mobilities Bristol and School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol
Section 1 Multiple Mobilities
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Moving people and places in premodern Europe
Lucy Donkin, Department of History of Art, University of Bristol
The early voyages of the East India Company, 1601-1617: a nonhuman and unheroic history
Laurence Publicover, Department of English, University of Bristol
Cows on the move: the (im)material politics of animal passports and the risk of antimicrobial resistance
María Paula Escobar Tello, Bristol Veterinary School, University of Bristol
Section 2 Productive Borders
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Migrants and borders in the Medieval English world
Brendan Smith, Dept of History, University of Bristol
The Aliens Order 1920, the ‘work permit’ and the making of the national labour market
Manoj Dias-Abey, University of Bristol Law School
The production and negotiation of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ migrant
Angelo Martins Junior, Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, University of Birmingham
Section 3 Transformative Representations
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Why can’t Chinese citizens go home? Spoiled citizenship and stigmatised returns in pandemic times
Juan Zhang, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol
The family idyll, exclusion and ideology in Persepolis
Nariman Massoumi, Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol
Sounds across borders and the Ukraine war
Florian Scheding, Department of Music, University of Bristol
Section 4 Beyond Migrants and Migration
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Constructing illegality: epistemic borderwork in the speeches of UK political elites
Holly Rooke, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, and Natasha Carver, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol.
Communities of resistance: migrant organising and transnational campaigning past and future
Brida Brennan, Transnational Institute, Amsterdam