Context of Inception: Rethinking Migration, Agency, and Conscription from a Global South Perspective

• In Event: Critical Epistemologies of the Global South (Co-sponsored by Global and Transnational Sociology Section)

Abstract

Migration research has long emphasized migrant agency, with increasing calls to center migrants’ subjectivities, autonomy, and “right to escape.” These interventions are valuable as they highlight individual and collective efforts to migrate; however, they often understate how agency is conditioned by—and can reproduce—broader historic-structural logics. Drawing on theorists from the geopolitical Global South, such as Abdelmalek Sayad and Ramón Grosfoguel, this paper introduces the Context of Inception (CoI) as a conceptual framework to address this tension, situating contemporary migration and subjectivities within the longue durée of modernity. Moving beyond segmented analyses—whether grounded in methodological nationalism or market-based explanations—the CoI foregrounds interconnected histories emphasized in broader efforts to rethink the foundations of sociology and, specifically, to liberate or decolonize migration research. The paper interrogates broader historic-structural dynamics shaping societies while also tracing how these forces are internalized and reproduced in migrants’ subjectivities and agencies. By emphasizing the intimate relationship between agency and structure, the CoI enables sociology to move past this persisting impasse, centering concepts such as courage, which migrants wield to navigate uncertain cartographies under conditions of asymmetrical power and constrained circumstances.

Author

• Carlos Alberto Aguilar Gonzalez, University of Pennsylvania