Trans-local Livelihoods and Connections: Embedding a Gender Perspective into Migration Studies

The Social Field of Migration: Conflict and Contention This volume examines intersections between gender, state policy, socio-cultural environment, with a focus on micro-interactions that shape the experience of migration in particular ways. It breaks from the convention that treats different social worlds of international migration as mutually exclusive legal categories. Dominant conceptions of migration produce forms of knowledge that fragment the processes of migration into internal, regional and transnational domains, while maintaining a strict analytical distinction between categories of legal and illegal migration. This fragmentation can obliterate dynamics that lie at the interface between the local, regional, and global domains and between the interlocking systems of migration and the embodied practices of control. Migration networks and practices respond to policy shifts as well as to the strategies of recruiters, employers, and migrants themselves. Knowledge about these dynamics is central to an understanding of contemporary transformations, from which more adequate responses to a range of denial of entitlements and rights and social experiences of security may be derived. Critically revisiting theories, concepts, and methodologies used, and their motivating values, can help to identify flaws and expose unjust aspects of dominant knowledge frameworks.