E-Books →Mobility, Agency, Kinship Representations of Migration Beyond Victimhood

The contributions explore the interplay between agency, kinship, and migration from various fields, including sociology, psychology, philosophy, border studies, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, film and media studies, and literary and cultural studies - with a special focus on interdisciplinary narrative theory. They address real and imagined assertions of migrant agency and kinship formations; draw on empirical research, interviews, and accounts of lived experiences; and analyze the role of narrative, media, and technologies in artistic, literary, and cinematic representations of migrant agency and kinship. By probing migrant identity discourses in different cultural and medial contexts, the contributions examine how narratives negotiate and challenge the unequal distribution of mobility, resources, and vulnerability that preconfigures many migrant lives; they also discuss narrative devices, storytelling techniques, and other representational strategies that migrants employ, as well as technologies that they draw on, to lay powerful claims on space and citizenship and to eschew established scripts of victimhood. As such, the volume addresses and embraces the tensions between vulnerability and agency that come to the fore when we try to understand the different ways in which migrants shape, and are shaped by, their (trans)local, material, economic, affective, social, cultural, and political realities.
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