Transnational Migration

Author(s)

Ayse Caglar

Abstract

Almost three decades ago, a group of scholars coined the term ‘transnational migration’ for a new paradigm to study contemporary migration beyond the confines of the nation-state borders. This paradigm provided new conceptual tools, entry points, and a unit of analysis to study migrants’ multiple processes of simultaneous incorporation in more than one place in a global and relational perspective. Since then, a vast scholarship on transnational migration developed, urging us to rethink the central concepts of Migration Studies, such as ethnicity, locality, sovereignty, governance, and multiple membership. The transnational migration paradigm reflects traces of the times and places of its inception. Despite its various readings, the way power, space, time, and scale have been conceptualised remains the most contested area of transnational migration studies. This chapter explores the blind spots of this paradigm in terms of its spatio-temporal frames and the way the post-colonial predicament of migration governance and subjectivities find place in this paradigm. The future challenges to this paradigm lie in breaking with these blind spots at the heart of its resilience to methodological nationalism. The chapter concludes with a call for a multiscalar conjunctural analysis of migration.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

No. of pages

10

DOI

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003194316

Publication date

2022

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504017 Cultural anthropology, 504021 Migration research

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Social Sciences

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/ba3994db-c9d4-4af9-9536-0937647c60e8