Trajectories and Imaginaries in Migration ― The Migrant Actor in Transnational Space

This book draws attention to the various factors that characterize migrant flows and mobilities, calling into question familiar concepts such as push and pull, migration as a life project and sociocultural integration. It highlights processes such as fl exible migrant routes, temporary and return migration, mental aspects of migration processes and transnationalism, which are organised around the themes of shaping trajectories, frictions in space, and the migrant mental framework. It brings together work from scholars from Europe and beyond, with the contributions collected emphasizing the social and mental processes that underpin the migratory process, which can be seen as the ‘soft side’ of migration. Too often, this side is neglected when the governance of migration is discussed. The novel ideas expressed here also help to overcome the mechanistic view of migration as a push-pull event. Thus, the book suggests a different understanding of migration and mobility as relational, non-linear and fluid social processes, characterized by instability in migrant life trajectories. Emphasizing the fl exibility of migrants and migration and advocating the importance of emotionally charged, individual perceptions as central to migrant decision-making, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, politics and geography with interests in migration and diaspora studies.

Felicitas Hillmann is head of the Research Unit Regeneration of Cities at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Germany and holds a professorship on Urban Transformation in International Perspective at Technische Universitat in Berlin, Germany.

Ton van Naerssen is an associate member of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR) at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Ernst Spaan is an assistant professor at Radboud Institute for Health Sciences, and an affiliated lecturer in courses on international migration and development at the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.