Beyond mechanistic and material approaches to migration: Transnational subjectivity, cultures of migration and notions of modernity and normality

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 12. Global and Transnational Perspectives

Abstract

Cultural approaches to migration conventionally focus on how beliefs and imaginaries of migration, anchored in local emigration environments, shape people’s ideas and practices of cross-border movement. This paper takes a transnational and subject-orientated view from “inside” by exploring how cultural ideas of migration are linked with conceptions of subjectivity and how these shape the ways people relate to themselves and to others. Linking literature on post-socialism with my own fieldwork on Polish migration to Germany, the paper shows how the long-standing tradition of Polish migration to the “West” has made migration a common, i.e. normal, practice, related to two interlinked expectations. It is related to expectations of a normal life as well as to becoming normal through migration. Thus, this paper aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of migrants’ subjectivity by showing that what people regard as a rational act is shaped by socially accepted life-making options and their interrelations with hegemonic concepts of subjectivity, which in the Polish case are deeply related to migration.

Author

• Karolina Barglowski, Technical University Dortmund