International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion
IMISCOE: TransMig
CEIFO, Stockholm University, SE 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Responsible researchers
Erik Olsson (contact person), CEIFO, Stockholm University
+46-8-163810, erik.olsson@ceifo.su.se
Nina Glick Schiller, RICC, Manchester University
+44 161
275 7106, nina.glickschiller@manchester.ac.uk
This programme depicts a series of three network-conferences with workshops and plenaries. The central aim of the programme is to seriously deal with the challenges involved in the adoption of a transnational approach by focussing on (national) border-transgressing practices that are in many respects constituting migration and diaspora phenomena. The main thrust is the organisation of workshops with a call for papers based on the empirical research of social practices of migrants and migration informed by a transnational approach. Departing from discussions in these workshops, there will be a planning and organisation of thematically organised publications in the form of books and/or articles falling under the main headings of Social networks and diasporic communities; Migration, markets and exchange; and State, policy and practices seen from the transmigrants’ points of view.
The main-organiser of the programme will be CEIFO at Stockholm University with the collaboration of RICC, Manchester University and the Research-network of transnationalism and Diaspora (a research-network of researchers mainly based in Sweden and Finland).
Programme foundations
The transnational approach in migration research is substantiated by a critical appreciation of the fact that much of conventional migration research is closely associated with the processes of nation state formation in the twentieth century, leading to a state of affairs where ‘[n]ation-state building processes have fundamentally shaped the ways immigration has been perceived and received’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002:301). When research views migration phenomena as exclusively national phenomena, it amounts to the ‘territorialising’ tendency in science known as ‘methodological nationalism’. In part, transnationalism reacts against the implied assumptions that ‘the web of social life was spun within the container of the national society, and everything extending over its borders was cut off analytically’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002: 307).
The criticism of something akin to methodological nationalism could be conceived as a major rationale motivating many researchers’ adoption of transnationalism as a relevant theoretical approach. But what is transnationalism and what are the new (if any) implications of the adoption of such an approach? These network-conferences aim to discuss the consequences for migration research of the possible paradigmatic shift that involves taking the transnational context as the analytical unit. Another question is how might science investigate the transnational phenomena? Many researchers have followed the path of transnationalism and have theoretically as well as empirically applied the transnational approach in their research. An ambition of this programme is to draw some of the experiences gained together and take a step that tries to develop well-tailored conceptual and methodological tools that are sensitive to trans-border phenomena.
The transnational perspective is addressed in three interrelated parts:
First, transnationalism emphasises a processual approach, which is contrary to the static approach. Researchers should direct their attention not only to migrants and their spatial movements,but also to phenomena and structures like social networks, community formation and social institutions as well as cultural practices, state policy and law, economic activities and transactions and how they are interconnected transnationally.
Second, a transnational approach needs to consider what happens across and beyond national borders, in movements, practices and flows. If migrants are important actors in the understanding of migration we have to study what in methodological nationalism is ‘cut off’, for example, multi-local attachments (Clifford 1994), diasporic practices (Brubaker 2005) and global flows (cf. Vertovec & Cohen 1999).
Third, a transnational approach must consider the implications of migrant agency in relation to the powerful, sedentary structures that belong to nation states as well as the emerging structures of transnationalism and how these affect gender and generation differently.
Further details of these events will be provided later.