Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race

A new volume edited by Professor Bridget Anderson, MMB, University of Bristol, to be published in early in 2025

There are considerable efforts by the academy, civil society and international organisations to myth bust anti-migration xenophobia. The challenge, however, is that the very category migrant – and associated relations of domination and subordination – is bound up with racial and global inequalities and with the nation state form itself.

This work investigates how we can rethink migration and movement outside this framework. It explores how international borders do much more than simply regulate mobilities, but actively produce both migrants and citizens and are entangled in the politics of race and nation. This entanglement interacts with the idea of the migrant as represented in the media and popular culture to reflect and reproduce changing ideas and hierarchies of belonging and community. At the same time, the fact that humans move, within and across many kinds of borders, reflects and impacts on ecosystems, socio-economic relations and technological change. Thus, migration is not a standalone issue but is connected to many other struggles for justice.

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