Österreich Z Soziol (2016) (Suppl 2) 41:37–54 DOI 10.1007/s11614-016-0230-x

Beyond ‘Migration Studies’: Locating human mobility in the context of social struggle and change Breda Gray

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016

Abstract In migration scholarship, questions of social conflict and transformation tend to be addressed as the backdrop rather than as central dynamics in changing migration practices. This article calls for the integration of migration within wider sociological analyses of social struggle and change. While it is true that the emergence of interdisciplinary approaches, such as Transnational Studies, Diaspora Studies and Mobility Studies, has moved migration studies in new directions, migration continues to be addressed separately from scholarship on social conflict and change. Nonetheless, these new domains challenge received sociological categories and develop more nuanced accounts by identifying distinct experiences of migration as shaped by contemporary mobilities and transnational processes. In this article I review these approaches and consider their potential for opening up new directions for the study of migration as an aspect of wider social struggles. I also examine the extent to which these fields of study work against the ‘capture’ of knowledge on migration by those forces that attempt to control it. Given the limitations identified, I argue that the ‘autonomy of migration’ approach provides important pointers for how social struggle and the politics of knowledge production might be centred in the study of migration. Keywords Migration · Transnational · Diaspora · Mobilities · ‘Autonomy of Migration’ · Social Struggle

The mobility of capital and labour as a central feature of contemporary global neoliberal capitalism are rendered more visible by the post 2008 global economic crisis and the rise of securitisation agendas in the Global North following 9/11. B. Gray () Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland E-Mail: [email protected]

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Although interrelated, the dynamics and effects of these mobilities are different. In contrast with the relatively frictionless mobility of capital, the mobility of people involves the negotiation of complex social relations and is intensively controlled via smart border controls, risk assessment, surveillance and security measures. And, although the mobility of people has rendered everyday worlds more diverse, security measures are legitimated by modern assumptions of homogenised territoriallybound nation-states and citizenship. Perhaps it is because the patterns and control of contemporary migrations are so contradictory and conflictual that political and media commentators turn to sociological research and theory in a search of answers (Appadurai 1996; Castles 2013; Tölölyan 1991, 1996). At the level of scholarship, however, sociologists have expressed concern about a tendency to separate migration research from broader sociological scholarship on social change (Castles 2007, 2010; see also Portes and DeWind 2004; Portes 2010; Munck and Hyland 2013). The gap between the study of migration and wider sociological scholarship arises because the former tends to be framed in terms of social problems based on assumptions about nation-state membership rather than as an aspect of social change. As such, knowledge about migration often contributes to and lines up with governmental and security narratives. Indeed, the institutionalisation of migration as an object of study, often under the title of ‘migration studies’, produces a ‘“discipline/disciplining of migration” as an academic domain of knowledge, as the governmental conduct of mobility, and as the governmentality at the intersection of these two layers’ (Garelli and Tazzioli 2013, p. 245). In other words, much migration scholarship is concerned with identifying motivations, flows and patterns of migration, or processes of migrant integration and is mobilised in the interests of managing and controlling migration flows and governing the lives of migrants. Because sociology has its roots in theorising the development of national industrial societies, the study of migration has suffered from ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck 2007) and a tendency to assume the ‘container’ model of the national state (Faist 2000). This is evident from the insistent focus in sociological scholarship on how migration changes both sending and receiving countries. It is also evident in a ‘sedentary bias’ which, instead of seeing migration as a feature of social life, conflict and change, views it as an aberration or problem to be solved (Castles 2007, 2010). Therefore, sociology, in its developmental, functionalist and critical guises reproduces the nation-state unit by rendering the stranger deviant and ‘politically dangerous’ and emphasising migrant integration in the receiving country (ibid.). It also reinforces nation-state specificity by collecting and analysing data mainly at national level and with reference to national histories and traditions. In these ways, ‘the dominant integrationist canon of migration studies’, attributes political subjectivity to migrants only if integrated in an existing polity (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, p. 187). It also participates in ‘the very same socio-political processes and struggles through which the “national” configuration of “society” (or, the social field) is reified and actualised as the territorial expression of state power’ (de Genova 2013, p. 251). Early 21st century social transformations, often labelled neoliberal capitalist globalisation, are characterised by a proliferation of migration patterns including ‘recur-

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ring, circulatory and onward migration’ which give rise to ‘a greater diversity of migratory experiences as well as more complex cultural interactions’ (Castles 2007, p. 353). Moreover, some see migration as an increasingly significant force in ‘the production and reproduction of capital’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, p. 180). One effect of these transformations is that migrants are regulated less through the ‘spatial regulation of working bodies’ that marked territorialised industrial capitalism and more via a migration control apparatus that assumes the mobility of labour and works as ‘an equaliser between [globalised] labour markets and migratory movements’ (ibid.). As such, the ways in which national legal systems and public imaginations identify migrants as ‘the only actors producing this complex process’ need to be challenged (Sassen 2006, p. 293 f. 12). In migration studies scholarship, social transformations tend to form the backdrop against which changing migration practices and their effects are addressed. However, the domain of migration studies has been revolutionised in recent decades as migration and associated phenomena such as diaspora have become more urgent concerns across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The emergence of interdisciplinary approaches to diaspora and the transnational respond to shifts ‘in the social structure and infrastructure of international migration’ and seek ‘to better describe and to grope toward a more powerful explanation of the emerging transnational reality’ (Lie 1995, p. 305). These approaches move beyond ‘macroscopic generalizations’ to highlight distinct experiences of migration as shaped by gender, class, ethnicity and other forms of social differentiation (ibid.). As such, they challenge ‘received sociological categories’ and produce to ‘new terms and ideas’ (ibid.). My aim in this article is to review the recent reframing of migration studies scholarship under the rubrics of Transnational, Diaspora or Mobility Studies and their success or otherwise in opening up new directions for the study of migration as an aspect of wider social struggles. I also examine the extent to which these bodies of scholarship work against ‘the disciplinary “captures” of ... knowledge of migration, with its governmental underpinnings and security narratives’ (Garelli and Tazzioli 2013, p. 245). The terms transnationalism and diaspora, which emerged in scholarship on migration in the 1990s, have been deployed most often as counterpoints to the assimilation model of immigrant incorporation and the container model of the nation state. As such, Transnational Studies (TS) and Diaspora Studies (DS) were seen as offering resources for rethinking scales of belonging and relationships between identity, place and mobility and subverting methodological nationalism which renders migration ‘an anomaly a problematic exception to the rule of people staying where they “belong”, that is in “their” nation-state’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 311). A third domain of study, which I’m calling Mobility Studies (MS), emerged in the early twenty-first century motivated by a critique of what were seen as the sedentarist assumptions underpinning dominant western social theory. This field of study addresses all forms of movement, including migration and sees movement as a foundational aspect of the social (Urry 2000). I review the bodies of scholarship emerging in these fields in the following three sections of this article before concluding with a discussion of how knowledge production about migration might be framed by wider processes of social struggle and might attempt to evade

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the imbrication of such knowledge production in projects of migration management and control.

1 Transnational Studies – re-spatialising social relations from below? TS scholarship was pioneered by Basch et al. (1994) whose work adopted a ‘transnationalism from below’ approach by focusing on the ways in which migrants themselves construct and live transnational lives. They advanced the argument that research on migration should not exclude migrants’ continuing relations with their societies of origin and defined transnationalism as: the process by which transmigrants, through their daily activities, forge and sustain multi-stranded social, economic, and political relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement, and through which they create transnational social fields that cross national borders (1994, p. 6). Of course this is not a new phenomenon as many migrants and their descendants maintained transnational ties in the past and engaged in practices that are not dissimilar to those of the present (Foner 1997; Glick Schiller 1999). However, in this scholarship, practices and flows are seen as having multiplied since the end of the twentieth century due to the internationalisation of markets, the globalisation of media and speeded-up communication and transport facilities, which together have created new facilitative infrastructures for long-distance, cross-border activities (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007; Vertovec 2009). Unlike globalisation, which tends to be conceived as a steamroller-like process with the same intensity, frequency and quality everywhere, transnationalism is anchored in specific places, times, processes and relations between specific people, thus emphasising individual and local agency (Levitt 2011b). The focus on ‘transnational communities’ in early TS scholarship has given way in recent years to a more dynamic emphasis on ‘transnational processes’. These processes are seen as constituting ‘transnational social fields’ populated by both those who have connections across nations because they are migrants, and those who haven’t moved but ‘are linked through social relations to people in distant and perhaps disparate locations’ (Glick Schiller 2004, p. 457). Thus, transnational social fields are held together by border crossings and the transnational relationships that give rise to and are sustained by these crossings and connections. As such, ‘persons in the sending and receiving societies become participants in a single social unit’ and the idea of society as bounded by the national territory is challenged (Glick Schiller 1999, p. 99). Multiple scales of practice, belonging and identification are addressed and attachments and practices are grounded in specific places of transnational space. As such, transnational social spaces are conceptualised as a ‘mix of “space of flows” and “spaces of places”’; ... combinations of ties, positions in networks and organizations, and networks of organizations that reach across the borders of multiple states’ (Faist 2004, p. 337). In this body of scholarship, therefore, migration is reconceived as emblematic of and constitutive of wider social processes, including

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the re-spatialisation and de-territorialisation of categories of belonging that in turn reconstitute social relations (Smith 2005; Gray 2011). A consensus seems to be emerging that TS offers an optic that never assumes the spatial unit of analysis in advance but sees this as emanating instead from the research questions, data and findings (Khagram and Levitt 2008). Here, the term transnational, insofar as it references the national, is a misnomer and continues to be used only because of the conceptual and methodological ground already laid down in its name (Levitt 2011b). Thus the term transnational persists as ‘a holding term’ in the absence of a more adequate conceptualisation (ibid.). Having acknowledged the limitations of the term, Levitt argues that the adoption of a transnational optic generates new ‘questions about incorporation and identity and comes up with a different set of answers’ (2011a, p. 15). As such, the process and outcome of TS framed research cannot be anticipated and the results are often ‘assemblages’ without any obvious logic or coherence, but ‘come together within and are made up of elements circulating within these transnational spaces’ (2011a, p. 11). Although the early literature implied that transnational practices characterised the lives of most contemporary migrants, evidence suggests that only a minority of migrants and their descendants are transnationally engaged on a regular basis (Guarnizo et al. 2003; Portes 2003). While often assumed to be most prevalent amongst the migrant generation and those who are marginalised and less acculturated, transnationalism is also evident across second and subsequent generations (Levitt 2011b), and is most prevalent amongst those with secure economic and legal status in the receiving country (Portes 2001, p. 189). The driving motivation in TS is to overcome methodological nationalism by keeping the locales of origin in play and highlighting the cross-border agent practices and agency of migrants themselves in interaction with the transnational movement of culture, religion, artefacts and politics. Bouras (2013) notes that transnationalism operates as a neutral term in the academic literature, perhaps even a positive term insofar as it emphasises the agency of migrants themselves. Indeed, the agency of individuals and bottom-up practices are contrasted in TS with cross-border activities at the level of the state, which are characterised as international (Portes 2001, p. 186). This may account for the tendency in TS to overlook the ways in which states attempt to control movement across borders including exit and entry and constrain the ‘ability of migrants living “here” to act in ways that yield leverage “there”’ (Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004, p. 1178). Waldinger and Fitzgerald argue that TS pays inadequate attention to how relations between states politically impact ‘the scope for multiple versus exclusive national loyalties’ (ibid.). In fact, the term transnationalism is very rarely used in contemporary political debates and migrant ties with their country of origin are viewed negatively by receiving states as evidence of failed integration (Bouras 2013, p. 1219). It seems therefore that the transnational, as it is made and re-made through migrant transnational practices, works more as a scholarly characterisation of how social relations are re-spatialised from below, than as a category of governance. As such, TS throws official and academic spatial categories into turmoil as migrants themselves through their everyday lives produce space anew and open up possibilities about how social relations might be (re)organised.

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While TS emphasises the significance of cross-border links and connections in the re-spatialising or re-temporalising social relations, less attention is paid to the kinds of conflicts and struggles that characterise these moments in the production of space (Mezzadra 2013), and how they emerge in conflict with nationalist, global capitalist and postcolonial forces. For these reasons, TS can be seen as downplaying the ways in which migrants must struggle with the tensions and conflicts that arise from the structuring forces of global capitalism, nation-state interests, and security agendas. Yet, in a world in which geo-political relations and global economic structures shape migration flows, the transnational, whether conceived as process, social field, or optic, can be understood as involving a ‘decidedly post-colonial reconfiguration of global class inequalities’ marked by racialised differences and involving a ‘“recolonization” of “immigrants” and “immigration”’ (de Genova 2010, p. 415). A more critical approach within TS might examine the ways in which migrant transnational activities evade or undermine attempts to turn them into manageable workers and citizens, or potential citizens. Diaspora Studies (DS), which I see as the study of boundary (un)(re)making, could be seen as bringing a more critical perspective how postcolonial relations shape migratory practices and politics in the present.

2 Diaspora Studies – Ethnicised (re)boundarying of the global? Discussions of migration and settlement in Diaspora Studies (DS) are generally located within ‘long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession’ that shape subjectivity through memory and loss (Cho 2007, p. 11). These histories of displacement are mobilised in myriad ways in the (un)(re)making of diaspora at different points in time-space. As such, DS can be distinguished from TS insofar as migration, border-crossing and connectivity are examined with regard to ‘what it means to be marked by the memory of migration ... [and] the knowledge of loss’ (2007, p. 19), as these are differently mobilised in the politics of the present. Although interdisciplinary, the field of DS is perhaps dominated by cultural studies perspectives that address agency and power relations primarily in relation to discourse and the politics of representation. Nonetheless, it is possible to (provisionally) organise the range of DS scholarship into five key (overlapping) approaches. The first strand adopts a ‘typologies of diaspora’ approach and has been developed mainly by sociologists and political scientists (Levy and Weingrod 2005; see Sheffer 1986, 2003; Safran 1991; Cohen 1997; Dufoix 2003). Here diaspora is deployed primarily as a descriptive term for a specific kind of collectivity/ entity formed through dispersal from a real or imagined homeland and which meets further ideal-typical criteria. In much of this literature the discussion is limited by a focus on the characteristics of diaspora and the extent to which a specific diaspora meets an identified ‘checklist’ (Butler 2001). This checklist is appealed to in an attempt to define the boundaries of diaspora identity and belonging. As such, this strand extends national and ethnic identity formations across the dispersed spatialities and temporalities while simultaneously attending to the conditions of dispersal and settlement.

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A second strand of DS scholarship, falling mainly within the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, defines diaspora as a displaced ethno-national collectivity that relates to both the territorial homeland and receiving country. Although often referred to in terms of ‘dual territoriality’ (Clifford 1994; Mishra 2006; see also Sheffer 1986, 2003), I call this the dual territoriality and temporality approach. The ‘homeland’ and receiving/’host’ country are imagined as coherent territorialised entities and ‘roots’ work is mobilised in such a way as to keep the ‘homeland’ central to diasporic memory and imaginary (Clifford 1994, 1997). Thus diaspora is conceived as an ‘ethnically coherent macro subject’ occupying a ‘zone of tension’ between ‘homeland’ and receiving/‘host’-land, but with loyalty to both (Mishra 2006, p. 28; Gray 2004). In this way, the diasporian is suspended between the bipolar territories of homeland and receiving country and experiences a sense of ‘living without belonging’ in the receiving/’host’ country while ‘belonging without living’ in the homeland (Mishra 2006, p. 16). However, the effect of the dislocation that constitutes these ‘unhomely denizens of diaspora’ is also temporal as subjectivity in diaspora is shaped too by a necessary straddling of the past and the present in memory and imagination (Cho 2007, p. 28). Thus, cultural memory works in the present to constitute subjectivity in diaspora. The work of boundary-making and boundarykeeping is achieved via the reproduction of home and host countries as homogeneous territorial entities and the mobilisation of a past marked by displacement in the present such that ethnicised diasporic subjectivity (although temporally and spatially split) tends to be privileged above gendered, raced, classed other aspects of subjectivity. While the approach discussed above tends to focus on diaspora in its singularity, e. g. the Chinese diaspora, the third strand (most evident in cultural studies and anthropology) adopts a social constructionist and relational perspective that stresses the deterritorialised, multipolar and hybrid nature of diaspora (Gilroy 1987 and, 1993; Clifford 1994, 1997; Brah 1996; Bauböck, 1994; Bhabha 1994; Hall 1990, 1992). For example, Stuart Hall argues that ‘diasporic identities emerge through difference and not as singular self-evident manifestations of diasporic experience’ (in Cho 2007, p. 21). Hybridity and cultural border-crossing are centered in Hall’s description of the Black diaspora in Britain as one in which ‘identity and difference are inextricably articulated or knotted together in different identities, the one never wholly obliterating the other’ (Hall 1992, p. 309). In this formulation, dislocations, memories, imaginings and practices are constitutive of and inform one another combining commonalities and differences (Cho 2007). By adopting this horizontal/ lateral conception of diaspora, a logic of assemblage (rather than a logic of roots based on genealogical reproduction of belonging) is suggested that has no necessary unity and can break at any point and connect at any point (Mishra 2006). As such, an emphasis on routes, boundary erosion and open-ended hybridity emerge from the ‘exchanges, crossings and mutual entanglements’ that are seen as central to living diaspora (Ang 2003; Gray 2004, 2006b). This rendering of diaspora references a mobile category that disrupts fixed identity categories. It has the potential, therefore, to unravel the micro/macro power relations that underpin the policing of boundaries and (im)permissible hybridisations in what Avtar Brah (1996) calls ‘diaspora space’. Much of the scholarship in this strand

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unsettles the operation of the centre/margins binary by identifying the destabilising effects of hybridised migrant subjectivities and identities. However, in some cases, the mobility and fluidity of subjectivity are celebrated without critical attention to the conditions that enable or constrain such mobility, or potential for subversion between and within diasporas. The fourth strand of scholarship identifies diaspora as a category of governance in which it is constituted as an autonomous actor and the target (and effect) of proliferating state diaspora engagement policies. This scholarship arises mainly in the fields of development studies, international relations, geography and sociology and focuses on local and global economic development, (inter)national security and foreign policy (De Haas 2006; Ionescu 2006; Kuznetsov 2006; Gamlen 2008). Since the early 2000s, diaspora has become institutionalised and emerged as a category of governance in three main ways: first, in the promotion of sending state ‘diaspora engagement’ policies as an economic development strategy by global institutions such as the World Bank and the UN Economic and Social Council; second, in discourses of ‘Aid’, whereby governments in the Global North channel Aid by mobilising resident diasporic groups from targeted countries as intermediaries in the delivery of Aid; and third, as sites of threat and the focus of securitisation agendas. These policy initiatives give diasporas the status of discrete political and economic actors that can economically and reputationally integrate sending state economies in the global economy, that can help channel and monitor delivery of Aid, but that can also act as threats to national and international interests. Such state-diaspora relations reconstitute the parameters of the state and regulate diasporas in specific ways. For example, by extending forms of membership to targeted co-ethnics abroad in the interests of economic development in the homeland, sending states engage in forms of long distance nationalism that have the effect of transnationalising the state itself (Gray 2012a, 2012b, 2006a). Moreover, targeted diasporians are conferred with new forms of membership in recognition of their joining of the ethnopreneurial with the entrepreneurial which in turn enables them to influence sending state economic policy (Gray 2012a) Globally connected diasporians are, therefore, increasingly significant political and economic actors in the globalisation and commodification of ethnic ‘difference’ and in the reproduction of ‘Ethnicity Inc.’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Finally, the archival approach to diaspora is adopted by scholars who depart from ‘general paradigms in favour of interrogative specificity’ by investigating diaspora formation in specific time-spaces, or ‘moments’ (Mishra 2006, p. 18). This approach is evident across the disciplines of history, social sciences and literature. Scholarship falling within this category gathers evidence or original data relating to specific diaspora formations in time and space. By moving from the general to the particular, those adopting this approach challenge abstract and totalising accounts of diaspora via localised and/or comparative studies (ibid.). The focus here is more on the everyday life of diaspora in a particular time-space and the specific practices, institutions and relations that constitute it. Such studies can vary from individual ethnic diaspora histories to an analysis of the similarities and/or differences between specific formations of diaspora, or changes in diasporic formation over time.

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All of these strands come together within DS as a field of study dominated by questions of how and whether boundaries can be drawn around dispersed peoples as, for example, ‘the global Irish’, or specific sections of a designated diaspora, such as the Jewish diaspora in Silicon Valley. This mode of boundary drawing increasingly mobilises cultural memories and sentiments in the interests of capital and sovereign power. However, the politics of these globalising ethnicised forms of boundary work and the ways in which diasporas struggle against them are only beginning to receive scholarly attention (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Boundary drawing tends to construct internal coherence and unity, but when diaspora is deployed or works to undermine or dissolve boundaries, then the work and politics of such boundary-making are brought into relief. Thus, for Ien Ang, diaspora is a double-edged notion that is often ‘proto-nationalist in its outlook’ because it can be defined by closure (2003, p. 144; see also Anthias 1998; Brubaker 2005), but also holds the potential for hybridisation and radical openness. As such, diaspora potentially entrenches nationalist norms of belonging in a new multi-located and multi-generational frame, but also holds out the possibility for new logics of affiliation. In these ways, diasporas can either reinforce, or act as ‘a troubling anomaly to the sovereign order’ (Nyers 2003, p. 1090). Because diasporas are ‘differentiated, heterogeneous, contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common “we”’, Brah calls on diaspora scholars ‘to be attentive to the nature and type of processes in and through which the collective ‘we’ is constituted’ (1996, p. 184). While the ways in which migration, displacement, memory and imagination work in the (re)formation of boundaries are addressed in all five strands of DS scholarship discussed above, the legacies and contemporary political and subjective effects of cultural dispossession and displacement are differently theorised in each strand. On the one hand, DS addresses the ways in which diaspora subjectivity (individual and collective) is produced through the postcolonial (re)workings of sovereignty and capitalism. But on the other hand, DS, especially as articulated in the third strand discussed above, emphasises those alternative ontologies and alternative ways of life that escape sovereign attempts to discipline, control and categorise. The proliferation and complexity of contemporary categories and modes of mobility and subjectivity are also addressed in a third body of scholarship – Mobility Studies – in which the movement of migrants is just one amongst many categories of mobile people and things.

3 Mobilities Studies: Ruling of and through mobilities Mobilities Studies (MS), which emerged as a new field of study in the early 2000s, addresses processes of globalisation and explicitly challenges ‘the academic tendency to ignore either past or present histories of human movement and interconnection’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013, p. 183/185). A central aim of MS is to ‘theorise mobility as basic to human social life in ways that normalise neither mobility nor stasis’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013, p. 184). It addresses emergent forms of connectivity and the ways in which social relations and practices are ‘be-

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ing rescripted by the rapid advance and uptake of Information and Communication Technologies and the use of Skype, tweeting and social networking sites’ (Smith and King 2012, p. 132). In this context, migration has become one of ‘the most important social expressions of global connections and processes’ (Castles 2007, p. 362). Scholarship in MS is concerned with multiple dimensions of mobility, including the variety of things that move and interconnections between these; the meanings of mobility; the different scales and politics of mobility; complex systems of mobility and connectivity; and the development of new modes of theorisation and methodology (Urry 2000, 2007; Cresswell 2011). Research in this field tends to be divided between studies of the micro aspects of movement, including motives, experiences, subjectivities and practices and the macro aspects emphasising the political, economic, material and technological preconditions for the movement of objects, information and people (D’Andrea et al. 2011). As such, this approach has been criticised for under-theorising the relationship between micro and macro aspects of (im)mobilities (ibid.). MS has also been criticised for homogenising ‘various forms of movement [of tourists, labour migrants, students and refugees] within a single category’ and for rendering mobility ‘strangely agentless and frictionless’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013, p. 185–186). However, research on migration has highlighted the ways in which different categories of mobile individuals or groups encounter varying levels and forms of ‘friction’. For example, developed economies in the Global North increasingly compete to attract highly-skilled workers but also require the labour of low-skilled migrant workers. These economic imperatives give rise to ‘migration regimes’ which facilitate and celebrate the ‘[m]ovements of the highly skilled ... as professional mobility’ while condemning ‘the lower-skilled ... as unwanted migration’ (Castles 2010, p. 1567; emphasis in original). Instead of ‘migration regimes’, Glick Schiller and Salazar suggest the term ‘regimes of mobility’ which, they argue, can be identified by attending to ‘the role of individual states and of changing international regulatory and surveillance administrations that affect individual mobility’ (2013, p. 189). As such, they privilege those forces that attempt to control and channel mobility over the mobile practices of migrants themselves. Migrant mobility and agency are understood in relation to how they are structured by ‘the relationships between the privileged movements of some and the co-dependent but stigmatised and forbidden movement, migration and interconnection of the poor, powerless and exploited’ (2013, p. 188). However, the picture with regard to labour mobility is more complex than this. Further governmental differentiations are made within mobility regimes and associated flows of migrant workers. For example, contra Glick Schiller and Salazar and Sassen’s (2006, p. 299) suggestion that it is mainly at the top and bottom of the social system that global classes of workers are emerging, Favell et al. (2007) argue that the highly skilled cannot always be seen as an ‘elite’ because geographical mobility has become a significant feature of many middle-class careers. They note that the relative lack of research on this category of migrants leaves a gap in knowledge regarding forms of migration and work that appear to be on the increase in a mobile global context and ‘that would be better seen as “middling” in class

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terms’ (2007, p. 17). But of course, mobile labour is not just stratified by class. As Lisa Lowe argues ‘capital has maximized its profits not by rendering labour “abstract” but precisely through the social production of “difference” ... marked by race, nation, geography, origin and gender’ (1996, p. 28 f). As ‘migration bleeds into mobility’ Favell et al. argue that ‘immigration is arguably becoming a less important focus of control than the new global mobility’ (2007, p. 20). These new forms of global mobility are characterised by an intensification of both mobility and connectivity to the extent that practices of subjectivity formation are also changing (Calás et al. 2013, p. 712). For example, Calás et al. suggest that transnational entrepreneurs can be seen as the primary subjects of contemporary neoliberal globalized capitalism because they ‘embody mobile ontological experiences as the common state of affairs’ (2013, p. 712). These conditions of capitalism support ‘a mobile, precarious and transitory accomplishment of selfhood temporarily fixed by neoliberal rhetoric of “choice” and “self-empowerment”’ (Paur in Calás et al. (2013, p. 726)). If global capitalism shapes the stratification of mobilities and subject positions, so too do state policies which introduce other modes of stratification, for example, by rendering ‘migrant labour into a manageable object for capital’ by means of ‘illegalisation’ or ‘legalisation’ (de Genova 2009, p. 461). To speak therefore of the polarisation of classes, the mobile middling classes, or particular kinds of subjects as emblematic features of contemporary global capitalism and its imperatives towards mobility, is to miss the point of the hyper-diversification of modes of production and subjective positions that are mobilised in the reproduction of contemporary global capitalism (Mezzadra 2011a). Mezzadro emphasises the simultaneous co-existence of ‘sweatshops, “pre-Fordist” factories and cognitive labor, corporatization of capital and accumulation in “primitive” forms, processes of financialization and forced labor’ (2011a, p. 162). This differentiated landscape points to ‘a deep heterogeneity of subjective positions and experiences within the composition of contemporary living labor, at the global as well as national levels’ (ibid.). Yet, studies such as that by Calás et al., that take mobility as their starting point, show how subjectivity, social relations and the making of societies and economies come together through the technologies of circulation and connection that materially construct societies. These technologies are, they argue, shaped and governed through the stratification and channelling of particular mobilities as well as the shaping of new mobile subjectivities. Moreover, because all forms of mobility are embedded in social relationships, they are ‘accompanied by complex dynamics of obligation, longing and connection’ (Conradson and McKay 2007, p. 170–171). When these dynamics are addressed, affect and emotion are brought into the study of mobility/ migration so that the competitive economic exchange values of global capitalism are connected with ‘less obviously economic forms of valuation in migrant connections to family, friends and particular places’ (2007, p. 172). In this way, questions of social reproduction are closely linked with the ‘material realities of production and consumption’ as these are organised in a more mobile world (ibid.). Noting the proliferation of studies in MS on the government of mobility, Jorgen Ole Baerenholdt (2013) suggests that perhaps a more fruitful line of analysis would be to focus on how circulation and mobility make societies and how societies are

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ruled through mobility and connection. He argues that ‘social relations among people and the political making of societies only come together through the technologies of circulation and connection’ (2013, p. 31). Bringing together the work of Michel Foucault and John Urry, Baerenholdt introduces the term ‘governmobility’ to refer to ‘ruling through connections’ which he suggests works ‘through mobile technologies and the environment’ (2013, p. 31). Attention is focused on the movement and circulation of people and things rather than on borders, but also on how spatial designs (of borders and other spatial contexts) regulate mobility and connection as well as the tactics and strategies of resistance engaged in by migrants. For Baerenholdt, MS play an important role in ‘raising questions about how to design smarter, more sustainable, mobility systems’ (2013, p. 32). The suggestion is that MS can move beyond critique without solutions, or policy recommendations, by providing utopian visions for how social life and mobilities could be designed and organised differently (ibid.). Yet, it is not clear how such visions escape either the government of mobility, or through mobility.

4 Concluding discussion Gayatri Spivak reminds us that ‘if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something which are possible within and by the arrangement of those lines’ (1993, p. 34). The framing of questions of migration by TS, DS and MS privilege translocal practices and connections, cultural memory in the work of boundary-making and the channelling and structures or experiences of mobilities respectively. Despite the attention devoted to sending countries and cultures, both TS and DS remain haunted by the concept of integration so that migrants are often perceived from the perspective of the receiving society and in relation to the promise of citizenship. And, although MS is more capacious and can incorporate research from a wider spectrum of perspectives, the links between structures and practices of mobilities tend to be under theorised (D’Andrea et al. 2011; Manderscheid 2013). We are left with many questions. For example, how might we overcome the tendency in TS to construct transnational fields/space through geographical and ethnic ties and connections without linking these to the economic imperatives of contemporary capitalism and the struggles of migrants against these? How might we develop the theorisation of ethnic and geo-political boundary (un)making in DS in ways that take account of the rise of the global cultural economy and the commodification of ethnicity? How might MS theorise migrant agency and subjectivity with regimes of mobility? More broadly, in what ways do our academic depictions and actions marginalise or silence migrants and mask our own complicities? What social and institutional power relations do academic framings of migration reproduce/ undermine? My aims in this concluding discussion are two-fold: first, to move beyond the (re)framing of migration in TS, DS and MS by opening up questions about how the study of migration might take greater account of socio-economic struggles and transformations, and second, to turn the lens back on the scholar/researcher of migration as an actor in the (re)production of knowledge.

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A helpful entry point for addressing the interface between regimes of mobility and migrant subjectivity and agency is the ‘autonomy of migration’ scholarship which emphasises processes of social struggle and change (Mezzadra 2011a, 2011b; Mitropoulos 2007; Papadopoulos et al. 2008). This approach builds on the autonomist Marxist tradition and emphasises aspects of subjectivity that are often lost in ‘objectivist’ readings of Marx (Mezzadra 2011b). Scholars working from this perspective see mobility/migration as political to the point of being understood as ‘a social movement’ and ‘not as a mere response to economic and social malaise.’ (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 202). They examine migrant struggles in terms that prioritise the subjective practices, desires and actions of migrants themselves (Mezzadra 2011b). Instead of understanding migrants as constituted in and through rationalities and technologies of control and regulation, they emphasise the ways in which these tactics of control must come to terms with migrants and migration which structurally exceed such practices of bordering and regulation (ibid.). One response, therefore, to the question of how migration might be researched as part of wider social struggles and processes of change is to start as TS does, from the activities of migrants themselves. But it also means reading capitalism through migration and understanding ‘governmentality through mobility rather than the other way around’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, p. 184). This is because the logic, motivations, capacities and trajectories of migration are seen as preceding attempts to control them rather than the other way around (ibid.). But control is not ignored; rather migration itself is seen as creating ‘new realities that allow migrants to exercise their own mobility against or beyond existing control’ (ibid.). While the conditions and possibilities of migration vary hugely between migrants, commonalities emerge from ‘different struggles for movement that confront the regime of mobility control (2013, p. 185). A key aim is to identify those moments of struggle for movement that have the effect of delegitimising or undermining ‘sovereign control’ (2013, p. 185). Encounters between capital and labour involve tensions and struggles that are played out in the embodied experience of migrants so that a focus on ‘the production of subjectivity’ is seen as enabling an understanding of the shifting dynamics of capitalism (Mezzadra 2011b, p. 160). Each ‘embodied encounter’ is framed by ‘broader relationships of power and antagonism ... hence always carries traces of those broader relationships’ (Scheel 2013, p. 284). A focus on the encounter facilitates the study of how ‘two interacting, but antagonistic’ actors operate in pursuit of ‘incommensurable and therefore conflictive agendas’ (2013, p. 284–285). From this perspective, it is in and through such encounters between moving people and those charged with controlling their mobility that migrants and bordered states come into being. For Scheel, these are ‘the performative interactions’ through which borders, nation-states and migrants are made, ‘first and foremost through “practical or bodily citations” and in “the bodily subject’s encounters with other bodies in the world”’ (2013, p. 286). Scholarship in this vein puts the very notions of citizenship, membership and nation-state belonging under pressure and considers instead the importance of the encounter between migrants and forms of migration control, but also the creative and innovative activities of migrants themselves in making their worlds. The focus shifts away from politics of inclusion/exclusion and migrant integration via citizenship

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towards those struggles and conflicts that arise from the myriad ways in which migrants claim and act as citizens in their everyday lives. Emphasising the ways in which migrants themselves repudiate their own objectification (and subjectification) by state and market modes of governance and securitisation, de Genova argues that migrants by ‘their very physical and bodily presence’ command ‘a response to the urgency of their insubordinate presence’ (2009, p. 450). In his analysis, migrant labour is given the status of ‘an unsettling presence that persistently disrupts the larger stakes of securing the regime of capitalist accumulation’ (2009, p. 461). The governmental ‘fantasy of migration management’ is challenged as the ways in which migrants elide and undermine attempts to regulate them are a central focus (Gray 2006c). If migration were studied as an aspect of larger social processes of conflict that animate ‘the composition-decomposition-recomposition of “society” itself’ (de Genova 2013, p. 252–253), it would challenge the tendency to address migration ‘as though it were not impacted by globalization and development, social and political struggles or the recurring crisis of capitalism for that matter’ (Munck and Hyland 2013). It would see migrant struggles as productive of knowledge and generative of new concepts to inform the formulation of research questions and projects (Garelli and Tazzioli 2013). It would critically investigate the interactions and frictions between knowledges and the day-to-day activities of migrants (Garelli and Tazzioli 2013, p. 245). It would also recognise that there is no outside, so that the researcher is implicated and involved in what s/he is researching and has to constantly negotiate these implications (Mezzadra 2013). Therefore, notion of critical distance between researcher and researched would be challenged and enquiry would be located at the heart of migrant struggles so that knowledge would become ‘part of and tools for’ such struggles (de Genova 2013). Because the production of knowledge on mobility and migration is itself governmental insofar as it has the performative effect of ‘world making’ (Garelli and Tazzioli 2013, p. 247), the production of knowledge about migration is always political. However, an explicit engagement with the conditions and politics of knowledge production is rare in migration studies. Indeed, Garelli and Tazzioli argue that migration is depoliticised via ‘its incorporation within the academic practices of a “-Studies”’ (2013, p. 246). Because knowledge is always imbricated with power, the production of knowledge about migration is also about disciplining and monitoring migration – making it more manageable. Even when produced in the interests of equality and social justice for migrants, such knowledge production can often reaffirm ‘the social Darwinism implicit in “development” in which “help” is framed as “the burden of the fittest”’ (Kapoor 2004, p. 632). Although developmentalist narratives and the postcolonial politics of knowledge production are addressed in DS debates about Eurocentrism and the ‘provincialising of Europe’, the meanings of diaspora and the concepts generated are limited by the relative absence of engagement with the struggles and scholarship of diasporas in the Global South. Moreover, with the proliferation of EU and state funded research on migration in recent decades, it is critically important that we examine the ways in which our research questions and projects are framed by our geopolitical positioning and the governmental rationalities of funders. As Spivak argues, the ‘why’ of

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our representations cannot be understood outside of ‘our institutional positioning’ (Spivak 2004, p. 527). This can mean that we produce the migrant to suit us, that is ‘in accordance with personal professional organisational interests’ so that our analysis of migration and migrants says more about us and our location in the world than that of the migrant (Kapoor 2004, p. 635–636). Even the invocation of the term ‘critical’ to suggest a more politicised engagement with our object of study ‘can easily “lend itself” to the very techniques of governance we critique’ (Ahmed 2013). For Sara Ahmed, the term ‘critical’ suggests ‘a fantasy of being seeing’, which implies a positioning of the researcher as able ‘to grasp processes otherwise hidden from view’ (ibid.). Instead, Ahmed points to the necessity of constant vigilance with regard to how we as researchers/scholars are complicit in the worlds we critique. Perhaps more importantly, she suggests that we may invoke terms like ‘critical’ as a way of distancing ourselves from addressing complicity. If instead, we take ‘complicity’ as ‘a starting point’, i. e. the recognition that we are ‘implicated in the worlds that we critique; being critical does not suspend any such implication’ (Ahmed 2013). I end with the question of how the study of migration might move beyond received framings and find ways of starting again in order to bring together political struggles for change with the production of potent concepts and theoretical innovation. This would mean privileging the practices and claims of migrants themselves and their potential to throw conventional categories (e. g. citizenship, nation-state) into crisis, thus opening up new ways of thinking about but also engaging in struggle for change that, in turn, informs research and theorising. At the same time, it is necessary to be on guard against migrant and researcher investments in, attachments to and complicity with categories of governance, as well as the promises of global capitalism and its flexible, mobile labour market. References Ang, Ien. 2003. Together-in-difference: beyond diaspora, into hybridity. Asian Studies Review 27(2):141–154. Anthias, Floya. 1998. Evaluating diaspora: beyond ethnicity? Sociology 32(3):557–580. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large. Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1994. Nations unbound: transnational projects, post-colonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states. Langhorne: Gordon and Breach. Bauböck, Rainer. 1994. Transnational citizenship: membership and rights in international migration. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Beck, Ulrich. 2007. The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails. Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8):286–290. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of diaspora: contesting identities. London: Routledge. Bouras, Nadia. 2013. Shifting perspectives on transnationalism: analysing Dutch political discourse on Moroccan migrants’ transnational ties, 1960–2010, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(7):1219–1231. Brubaker, Roger. 2005. The “diaspora” diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1):1–19. Butler, Kim D. 2001. Defining diaspora, refining a discourse. Diaspora 10(2):189–219. Bærenholdt, Jørgen Ole. 2013. Governmobility: the powers of mobility. Mobilities 8(1):20–34. Calás, Marta B., Han Ou, and Linda Smircich. 2013. “Woman” on the move: mobile subjectivities after intersectionality. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 32(8):708–731.

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de Haas, Hein. 2006. Engaging diasporas: how governments and development agencies can support diaspora involvement in the development of origin countries. A study for Oxfam Novib. International Migration Institute http://www.heindehaas.com/Publications/de%20Haas%202006%20-%20Engaging %20Diasporas.pdf. Accessed 11 Sept. 2010. Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural identity and diaspora. In Identity, community, culture, difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, Stuart. 1992. The question of cultural identity. In Modernity and its futures, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew, 274–316. Cambridge: Polity Press. (in association with Blackwell and The Open University). Ionescu, Dina. 2006. Engaging diasporas as development partners for home and destination countries: challenges for policymakers. Geneva: IOM. James, Clifford. 1997. Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kapoor, Ilan. 2004. Hyper-self-reflexive development? Spivak on representing the third world “other”. Third World Quarterly 25(4):627–647. Khagram, Sanjeev, and Peggy Levitt. 2008. Constructing transnational studies. In The transnational studies reader. intersections & innovations, eds. Sanjeev Khagram, and Peggy Levitt, 1–23. New York: Routledge. Kuznetsov, Yevgeny (ed.). 2006. Diaspora networks and the international migration of skills: how countries can draw on their talent abroad. WBI Development Studies. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Levitt, Peggy. 2011a. A transnational gaze. Migraciones Internacionales 6(1):9–44. Levitt, Peggy. 2011b. How sociology is “going transnational”: from the study of religious to cultural transformations. Irish Journal of Sociology 19(2):8–26. Levitt, Peggy, and Nadya Jaworsky. 2007. Transnational migration studies: past developments and future trends. Annual Review of Sociology 33:129–156. Levy, Andre, and Alex Weingrod. 2005. On homelands and diasporas. An introduction. In Homelands and diasporas. Holy lands and other places, eds. Andre Levy, and Alex Weingrod, 3–26. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lie, John. 1995. From international migration to transnational diaspora. Contemporary Sociology 24(4):303–306. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant acts. On Asian American cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manderscheid, Katharina. 2013. Criticising the solitary mobile subject: researching relational mobilities and reflecting on mobile methods. Mobilities doi:10.1080/17450101.2013.830406. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011a. Bringing capital back in: a materialist turn in postcolonial studies? Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12(1):154–164. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011b. The Gaze of autonomy. Capitalism, migration, and social struggles. In The contested politics of mobility: borderzones and irregularity, ed. Vicky Squire, 121–142. London: Routledge. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2013. Double opening: split temporality, and new spatialities: an interview with Sandra Mezzadra on ‘militant research. Postcolonial Studies 16(3):309–319. Mishra, Sudesh. 2006. Diaspora criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mitropoulos, Angela. 2007. Autonomy, recognition, movement. In Constituent imagination. Militant investigations, collective theorization, eds. Stephen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle, 127–136. Oakland: AK Press. Munck, Ronaldo, and Mary Hyland. 2013. Migration, regional integration and social transformation: a north-south comparative approach. Global Social Policy doi:10.1177/1468018113504773. Nyers, Peter. 2003. Abject cosmopolitanism: the politics of protection in the anti-deportation movement. Third World Quarterly 24(6):1069–1093. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos. 2008. Escape routes. Control and subversion in the 21st century. Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, and Vassilis Tsianos. 2013. After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons. Citizenship Studies 17(2):178–196.. Portes, Alejandro. 2001. Introduction: the debates and significance of immigrant transnationalism. Global Networks 1(3):181–193. Portes, Alejandro. 2003. Conclusion: theoretical convergences and empirical evidence in the study of immigrant transnationalism. International Migration Review 37(3):874–892. Portes, Alejandro. 2010. Migration and social change: some conceptual reflections. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36(10):1537–1563.

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Portes, Alejandro, and Josh de Wind. 2004. A cross-Atlantic dialogue: the progress of research and theory in the study of international migration. International Migration Review 38(3):828–851. Safran, William. 1991. Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return. Diaspora 1(1):83–99. Sara, Ahmed. 2013. Critical racism/critical sexism. http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/12/19/criticalracismcrical-sexism/. Accessed 16. Jan 2014. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, authority, rights. From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scheel, Stephan. 2013. Studying embodied encounters: autonomy of migration beyond its romanticization, Postcolonial Studies 16(3):279–288. Sheffer, Gabriel (ed.). 1986. Modern diasporas in international politics. London: Croom Helm. Sheffer, Gabriel. 2003. Diaspora politics: at home abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Peter Michael. 2005. Transnational urbanism revisited. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31:235–244. Smith, Darren P., and Russell King. 2012. Editorial introduction: re-making migration theory. Population, Space and Place 18:127–133. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside in the teaching machine. New York: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2004. ‘Righting Wrongs’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2/3):523–581. Tölölyan, Khachig. 1991. The nation state and its others: in lieu of a preface. Diaspora 1(1):3–7. Tölölyan, K. Khachig. 1996. Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless power in the transnational moment. Diaspora 5(1):3–36. Urry, John. 2000. Sociology beyond societies. Mobilities for the twenty-first century. London: Routledge. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Vertovec, Steven. 2009. Transnationalism. London: Routledge. Waldinger, Roger D., and David Fitzgerald. 2004. Transnationalism in Question. American Journal of Sociology 109(5):1177–1195. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks 2(4):301–334. Breda Gray is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Director of the MA in Gender Culture & Society at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is co-convenor of the University of Limerick and National University of Ireland, Galway research consortium Gender ARC. She has published widely on gender, diaspora, transnationalism and mobility. Publications include: Women and the Irish Diaspora (2004); co-editor Mobilities 6(2) 2011; editor of special issue Irish Journal of Sociology 19(2) 2011 on transnationalism. She has also published in the journals Sociology, International Review of Social Research, Migration Letters, Mobilities, European Journal for Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies International Forum, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Irish Studies Review, Youth and Policy and National Women’s Studies Association Journal. Current research projects include: ‘The Irish Catholic Church and the Politics of Migration’ (www.ul.ie/icctmp) and ‘Nomadic Work/Life and the Knowledge economy’ (http:/nwl.ul.ie).

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