Short Abstract

This panel explores the extensions of political engagement among activists from the Global South who have migrated to the Global North. It aims to trace how activist lives are reconfigured through processes of displacement and racialization encountered during their immigration journeys.

Long Abstract

This panel explores the extensions of political engagement among activists from the Global South who have migrated or gone into exile in the Global North. It aims to trace how political identities and activist lives are reconfigured through processes of displacement and racialization encountered during their immigration journeys. While critical scholarship on social movements and contentious politics in the Global South has been emerging to expand our understandings of resistance rooted in historically situated experiences of repression and collective struggle, much less attention has been given to what follows when these actors leave their original sites of resistance. This panel explores how migration does not mark an endpoint in activism but opens a new, complex phase in which the meanings of resistance and political participation are renegotiated in countries of the Global North with activists’ new racialized identities within them.

This panel takes an interdisciplinary approach to answer the following questions: how do prior activist experiences translate into new political, social, and artistic forms of life abroad? How do processes of racialization shape these activists’ sense of self and possibilities for future engagement? If not, why? What knowledge is rechannelled into new forms of critique, solidarity, and creative expression, and what knowledge is left behind? And finally, how can we develop methodological tools to capture this transformation? The panel seeks to gather scholars to develop a conceptual and methodological framework for understanding the trajectories of activism from the Global South to the Global North by moving beyond narratives of rupture and loss, and instead foregrounding continuity and transformation.

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