Short Abstract

The panel explores the complex entanglement of migration, affects, and belonging. Emotions and affects both shape and are shaped by mobility, compelling subjects to navigate emotional practices and belonging strategies that are collectively constituted within the migratory experience.

Long Abstract

Migration is a complex, multi-layered, and multi-situated experience. Although we are witnessing worldwide the rise of institutional discourses grounded in polarization and exclusion - discourses that depict the migrant as either “in” or “out”- embodied migrant life experiences reveal that migration is never simplistic or dualistic. Rather, it is nuanced, heterogeneous, and fundamentally emotional and affective. The experience of migration - from the decision to embark on the journey, through the migrants’ everyday interactions within new sites of settlement, to the return - activates affective encounters that exceed the specificities of individual migratory trajectories or types of mobility (Geoffrion & Cretton, 2021; Svašek, 2010). Migrants’ exposure to discrimination and to anti-immigration discourses, the formation of multiple attachments and belongings to places and people - experienced, remembered, and imagined- across both origin and destination, as well as the globally conventionalized forms of bureaucratic encounters, exemplify some of the affective dimensions of contemporary mobility (Wettergren, 2019). We take affects and emotions as a starting point for a deeper understanding of the embodied interactions between migrant populations and local communities - as these interactions connect migrants to the sociomaterial worlds they inhabit and make sense of. We are particularly interested in ethnographic contributions that investigate and unpack the emotional, affective, and embodied discourses and practices of migration - not as counterpoints to its political and economic dimensions, but as integral and potentially transformative components of these relational dynamics.

Geoffrion, K. and Cretton, V. (2021). Bureaucratic Routes to Migration. Migrants’ Lived Experience of Paperwork, Clerks and Other Immigration Intermediaries. Anthropologica, 63(1), 1-28.

Svašek, M. (2010). On the move: Emotions and human mobility. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(6), 865-880.

Wettergren, Å. (2019). Emotive-cognitive rationality, background emotions and emotion work. En Patulny, et al. (Eds.), Emotions in late modernity (pp. 27-40). Routledge.

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