Introduction: Migration and Migrant Lives: Improvisation, Creativity, and Adaptation

Authors

  • Amie L. Lennox Massey University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11157/sites-id447

Keywords:

migration

Abstract

This issue addresses the fixity and motion of migration in two broad areas. The first is the idea of identities in motion, in flux. This idea has been the habitat of anthropologists for decades. How do migrants and refugees make sense of the new world that they inhabit, and the process by which they have come to be in a new place? Who are they now, what does community look like, what are the relationships between the past, the present, and the future, when a person is supplanted in a new culture, place, and climate? The other aspect is the precarity of migrants and asylum seekers when they are in motion, when they find themselves temporary, in transit, struggling to attain a better position in the global economy or even just to survive. The precarity of migrants away from social structures and the known is magnified and multiplied under indifferent, exclusionary, and hostile host settings. In both senses, migration becomes a space of making and remaking worlds and identities. The articles in this issue reveal how, even on multiple planes of choice and necessity for survival, migration is a site of incredible creativity, strategy, and unexpected connections.

Author Biography

Amie L. Lennox, Massey University

Amie Lennox is a recent PhD graduate in social anthropology from Massey University, New Zealand. Her research explores the relationships between individual experiences of exploitation and wider social structures in the context of the Philippines. Her focus is on ethnography and life-narrative methodologies, and she has specifically explored the multiple forms of human trafficking in Mindanao, the Philippines.

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Published

09-12-2019

How to Cite

Lennox, A. L. (2019). Introduction: Migration and Migrant Lives: Improvisation, Creativity, and Adaptation. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.11157/sites-id447

Issue

Section

Articles