Migrant Futures

Migrant Futures
Author: Aimee Bahng
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2018-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373017

In Migrant Futures Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against those of speculative fiction. While financial speculation creates a future based on predicting and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, the wide range of speculative novels, comics, films, and narratives Bahng examines imagines alternative futures that envision the multiple possibilities that exist beyond capital’s reach. Whether presenting new spatial futures of the US-Mexico borderlands or inventing forms of kinship in Singapore in order to survive in an economy designed for the few, the varied texts Bahng analyzes illuminate how the futurity of speculative finance is experienced by those who find themselves mired in it. At the same time these displaced, undocumented, unbanked, and disavowed characters imagine alternative visions of the future that offer ways to bring forth new political economies, social structures, and subjectivities that exceed the framework of capitalism.

Migration and Radicalization

Migration and Radicalization
Author: Gabriel Rubin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2021-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030693996

This book explores the connections between migration and terrorism and extrapolates, with the help of current research and case studies, what the future may hold for both issues. Migration and Radicalization: Global Futures looks at how migrants and terrorists have both been treated as Others outside the body politic, how growing migrant flows borne of a rickety state system cause both natives and migrants to turn violent, and how terrorist radicalization and tensions between natives and migrants can be reduced. As he contemplates potential global futures in the light of migration and radicalization, Gabriel Rubin charts a course between contemporary migration and terrorism scholarship, exploring their interactions in a methodologically rigorous but theoretically bold investigation.

African Exodus

African Exodus
Author: Asfa-Wossen Asserate
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2018-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1910376914

In 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Africa and the Near East took flight and sought refuge in Europe. By the end of that year, some 1.8 million migrants had arrived in the EU, the vast majority having come across the Mediterranean. Since then, despite measures to host some of the people fleeing the Syrian war in Turkey and concurrent attempts to physically seal off some borders in Eastern Europe, the numbers of refugees traveling to Europe has continued to top half a million annually. A mass migration on a scale not witnessed in modern times is underway, and it has presented Europe with its greatest challenge of the twenty-first century. Asfa-Wossen Asserate argues here that building higher fences or finding more effective methods of integration will only, in the long term, perpetuate rather than solve the problems associated with these large numbers of displaced refugees. We need to realize that we are only treating the symptoms of an oncoming catastrophe and that, if we are to respond to mass migration, we will ultimately have to understand its causes. African Exodus places its emphasis firmly on the causes of the refugee crisis, which are to be found not least in Europe itself, and charts ways in which we might deal with it effectively in the long term. In the course of this analysis, Asserate asks why our view of Africa—a troubled continent, but rich in so many ways—is so distorted. How can we combat the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that stymie progress and development? Why are millions fleeing to Europe? How is the EU complicit in the migration crisis? And finally, in practical terms: what can be done, and what prospects does the future hold?

Migrant Conversions

Migrant Conversions
Author: Erica Vogel
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2020-03-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520341171

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Peruvian migrant workers began arriving in South Korea in large numbers in the mid 1990s, eventually becoming one of the largest groups of non-Asians in the country. Migrant Conversions shows how despite facing unstable income and legal exclusion, migrants come to see Korea as an ideal destination. Some even see it as part of their divine destiny. Faced with looming departures, Peruvians develop cosmopolitan plans to transform themselves from economic migrants into pastors, lovers, and leaders. Set against the backdrop of 2008’s global financial crisis, Vogel explores the intersections of three types of conversions— money, religious beliefs and cosmopolitan plans—to argue that conversions are how migrants negotiate the meaning of their lives in a constantly changing transnational context. At the convergence of cosmopolitan projects spearheaded by the state, churches, and other migrants, Peruvians change the value and meaning of their migrations. Yet, in attempting to make themselves at home in the world and give their families more opportunities, they also create potential losses. As Peruvians help carve out social spaces, they create complex and uneven connections between Peru and Korea that challenge a global hierarchy of nations and migrants. Exploring how migrants, churches and nations change through processes of conversion reveals how globalization continues to impact people’s lives and ideas about their futures and pasts long after they have stopped moving, or that particular global moment has come to an end.

Chasing the Harvest

Chasing the Harvest
Author: Gabriel Thompson
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017-05-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786632209

Lives from an invisible community—the migrant farmworkers of the United States The Grapes of Wrath brought national attention to the condition of California’s migrant farmworkers in the 1930s. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ grape and lettuce boycotts captured the imagination of the United States in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet today, the stories of the more than 800,000 men, women, and children working in California’s fields—one third of the nation’s agricultural work force—are rarely heard, despite the persistence of wage theft, dangerous working conditions, and uncertain futures. This book of oral histories makes the reality of farm work visible in accounts of hardship, bravery, solidarity, and creativity in California’s fields, as real people struggle to win new opportunities for future generations. Among the narrators: Maricruz, a single mother fired from a packing plant after filing a sexual assault complaint against her supervisor. Roberto, a vineyard laborer in the scorching Coachella Valley who became an advocate for more humane working conditions after his teenage son almost died of heatstroke. Oscar, an elementary school teacher in Salinas who wants to free his students from a life in the fields, the fate that once awaited him as a child.

Can We Solve the Migration Crisis?

Can We Solve the Migration Crisis?
Author: Jacqueline Bhabha
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2018-07-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509519432

Every minute 24 people are forced to leave their homes and over 65 million are currently displaced world-wide. Small wonder that tackling the refugee and migration crisis has become a global political priority. But can this crisis be resolved and if so, how? In this compelling essay, renowned human rights lawyer and scholar Jacqueline Bhabha explains why forced migration demands compassion, generosity and a more vigorous acknowledgement of our shared dependence on human mobility as a key element of global collaboration. Unless we develop humane 'win-win' strategies for tackling the inequalities and conflicts driving migration and for addressing the fears fuelling xenophobia, she argues, both innocent lives and cardinal human rights principles will be squandered in the service of futile nationalism and oppressive border control.

Old Futures

Old Futures
Author: Alexis Lothian
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 147980343X

Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time, breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead us to queer the present. Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption. Each chapter chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics, utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity, masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex. Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new insights into what we can learn from efforts to imaginatively redistribute the future.

Speculative Wests

Speculative Wests
Author: Michael K. Johnson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2023
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496233506

Speculative Wests investigates representations of the American West in terms of both region and genre, looking at speculative westerns (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) as well as at other speculative texts that feature western settings.

Childhood, Youth and Migration

Childhood, Youth and Migration
Author: Christine Hunner-Kreisel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319311115

This book shows the different ways in which migration matters in the context of global and local childhood and youth. Furthermore, it highlights that childhood, youth and migration as well as local and global perspectives need to be thought and analyzed together, to address the significant dimensions of social inequality in the context of growing up. Migration as a phenomenon is most often motivated by the search for a better life. Very often children and young people, migrating alone or together with their families, migrate to ameliorate their own or others’ living conditions and seize opportunities for realizing a good life. Today as well as in the past this search for a better life is very often triggered by socio-economic reasons, war or terrorism. Against the backdrop of the topic raised above the book deals with children and young people’s own perspective in countries of migration. It promotes the idea of connecting global and local issues of childhood and youth with a special focus on questions of education. It studies questions of global and local living and highlights living circumstances shaped by patterns of migration and mobility.

Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing

Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing
Author: Chase, Elaine
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-11-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529209021

This book examines the factors affecting the health and wellbeing of young people as they transition to adulthood under the shadow of migration control. Drawing on unique longitudinal data, it illuminates how they conceptualize wellbeing for themselves and others in contexts of prolonged and politically induced uncertainty. The authors offer an in-depth analysis of the experiences of over one hundred unaccompanied young migrants, primarily from Afghanistan, Albania and Eritrea. They show the lengths these young people will go to in pursuit of safety, security and the futures they aspire to. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book champions a new political economy analysis of wellbeing in the context of migration and demonstrates the urgent need for policy reform.