Still 'migrants' after all those years

Author(s)

Ayse Caglar

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article concentrates on the ‘post migrant’ perspective formulated by migration scholars and cultural producers in to analyse migrant subjectivities, and practices beyond the culturalising and ethnicising logics of migration scholarship and public debates. I put the spatial and temporal frameworks informing this approach to migrant dynamics under scrutiny and argue that this concept remains of limited analytical value as it denies migrants coevalness with ‘non-migrants’. I suggest an alternative perspective deploying concepts of displacement, disposession and emplacement, which might allow us to avoid the spatial and temporal impediments of the post migrant perspective and would instead facilitate us to approach migrants and non-migrants from within a common analytical lens. In the last part of the article, I situate the strategic success of the post migrant intervention in Vienna, despite its analytical fault lines, within the scalar dynamics of city making at a particular conjuncture in time.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Journal

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Volume

42

Pages

952-969

No. of pages

18

ISSN

1369-183X

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1126085

Publication date

02-2016

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504017 Cultural anthropology, 504021 Migration research

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Demography, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/a0621020-5b21-4cec-b637-385edc011eee