Short Abstract

This lab encourages critical and creative engagements with ‘nonmigrations’ understood as movements beyond, but not untouched by, ingrained affects, materialities, and politics related to migration. We attempt to demigranticize movements and challenge their conventional and hyper-politicized framing.

Long Abstract

Migration has become a political meta-object. In computer science, the term describes an object that generates, modifies, and signifies other objects. Similarly, migration can be described as an operating device facilitating the designation and generation of exclusion, inequalities, and violence, but also of (counter-)movements, affiliation, and alliances. This lab encourages engagements with what we call ‘nonmigrations’. Rather than framing them as the absence of mobile people and things, we define nonmigrations as movements, stuckness, and ways of being that concern societies beyond, but not untouched by, ingrained affects, materialities, and politics related to migration. We understand efforts to comprehend nonmigrations as contributions to the demigranticization of movements, challenging their conventional and hyper-politicized framing.

We invite participants to use the full range of their creative skill set to grasp these ‘foils’ or ‘undercurrents’ of migration. Their engagements with nonmigrations can include, but are not limited to, affective, material, ontological, ecological, more-than-human, political, experimental, multimodal, arts, digital, and AI-based contributions. We also welcome contributions that advance intersectional perspectives and engage with concepts from critical migration studies—such as critiques of methodological nationalism, concepts of the autonomy of migration, decolonial advances, postmigration perspectives, and reflexive methodologies.

As speakers of the Working Group Migration, we are interested in bringing together anthropologists and researchers working in various moving fields and with varied expertise. We particularly champion opportunities for precarious and under-resourced researchers to participate. If your contribution requires support or specific arrangements, we try our best to make them possible.