Abstract

Recently, Europe has found itself questioning and re-examining the institutional and media responses across European states in the wake of the so called “refugee crisis”. The diversity of research perspectives at CES can potentially contribute to the construction of a critique, articulated and innovative approach to the current "refugee crisis", which would thrive on the internal thematic richness.

`Narratives of migration` include those caught in a double perspective: as discourses on migration and migrants which are built from the position of power of the State apparatus and opinion agencies/makers of the `receiving` nation/continent (in our case Europe) and those accompanying the experience of migration and sustaining a position of subjectivity, resistance and contestation. These narratives are to be considered in their multifariousness and complexity as the result of the encounters of different and conflictual cultural backgrounds and form of subjectivation/oppression.

`Spaces of migration` are, for the Inter-Thematic group, both material and symbolic: they entail the discursive dimension of the national 'imagined community' as well as of the physical trajectories crossing national borders; they refer to the public space delimited by state migration policies and discourses as well as to the intimate space of the experience of migration; they are shaped by trans/national labour markets as well as by migrant labour subjectivities and contestations, by conflicts as well as forms of solidarity. Spaces are thus articulated by institutional, individual, collective, and cultural dynamics, and shaped by power relations based, for instance, on gender, race, sexuality and social class. Spaces are, finally, those that both define and are continuously rearticulated by discourses and practices of citizenship, belonging, identity, outsiderness and otherness.

Organized by Grupo Inter-Temático de Migrações (ITM) do Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES) da Universidade de Coimbra