Altering Aspirations: Migration Control, (Im)Mobility, and Imagined Futures

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Migration Aspirations and Decision-Making

Abstract

This article explores how the sociology of imagined futures can deepen the conceptualization of migration aspirations and migration decision-making. Focusing on imagined futures and drawing from that literature foregrounds the process by which potential migrants’ imaginaries of the future are constituted, constructed, and contested. This perspective emphasizes the subjective and non-rationalistic experience of migration decision-making, as well as the future orientation of aspirations. Using migration control policies aimed at containing, deterring, and returning migrants by way of influencing their aspirations, this article demonstrates that imaginaries of the future are critical to aspirations and attempts to alter them. I draw from work on the aspirations-capabilities model of migration decision-making to link these policies to theories of migration aspirations, and then show the centrality of imaginaries of multiple futures. This engagement serves to benefit not only scholarship on migration aspirations and decision-making, but also developments at the theoretical frontiers of the sociology of imagined futures.

Author

• Roxanne Louise Corbeil, University of California-Los Angeles