Ethnographies of Migration and Displacement

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel features ethnographic approaches to the study of human mobility. As a method, ethnography entails sustained immersion in the places and lives of people under study (Wedeen 2010). As a mode of generating knowledge about the world, it requires a commitment to chronicle aspects of lived experience and a sensibility to the meanings attributed by those observed to their political reality (Schatz 2009). Ethnography is uniquely equipped to microscopically examine the foundations of political institutions and their attendant sets of practices. It is well suited to explain why political actors behave in certain ways and to identify the causes, processes, and outcomes that are central to political life (Auyero 2006). Scholars of migration have long produced nuanced ethnographic studies of immigrant communities across borders, generating rich insight into the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, the lived experience of forced displacement, assimilation, and socio-economic integration, and the politics of identity and belonging. With a shared commitment to ethnographic research, the authors on this panel address topics such as dance and nationalism in Northern Thailand, generational strategies of resistance to regimes of (im)mobility across the U.S. / Mexico border, the production of returnee and non-migrant identities in post-civil war Burundi, and the transnational funerary practices of Turkish and Kurdish communities in Germany. Taken together, these papers highlight the unique contributions that ethnographic studies bring to bear on the politics of migration and displacement.

Sub Unit

• Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

Individual Presentations

• Transnational Lives, Transnational Deaths: Mourning as a Migrant - Osman Balkan, Swarthmore College

• Afterlives of Mexican Migration: Necro-ethnographies of (Im)mobility - Adrián Félix, University of California Riverside

• You Left, We Stayed Behind: Displacement-Based Identity Formation After Civil War - Stephanie Schwartz, University of Southern California

• The Art of Exile: Gesture, Movement, and Silence in the Thai-Myanmar Border-Zone - Tani H Sebro, Humboldt State University

Chair

• Cristina Beltran New York University

Discussant

• Nicholas Rush Smith CUNY-City College