Onward Migration and Multi-Sited Transnationalism

Front matter

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Preface

The idea for this book stems from the editors’ shared interest in people whose lives are embedded in multiple countries and places. Moving away from the simplistic understanding of migration as a move between one origin and a single destination, the editors and the chapter authors stress the fluidity and non-linearity of the migration process. The volume emphasises the variety of migration paths and sequences and proposes multi-sited field studies to capture this complexity. Onward migrants, by the nature of their multi-step migration trajectories, straddle multiple borders. Their transnationally mobile lives involve cross-border visits, remittance-sending and staying in touch with relatives and friends in a variety of places. Yet people's repeat and ongoing mobilities and ties to multiple places are often treated as extraordinary. Our approach in this book is to visualise migration as fragmented, stepwise and best understood as processual, situational and relational. Even though recent scholarship acknowledges more complex mobilities and connections across borders, space and time, frameworks such as transnationalism are still generally applied with a bifocal lens. Our aim is to geographically broaden the way in which transnational ties and mobilities are perceived and analysed through exploring the concept and practice of onward migration and the complementary analytical approach of multi-sited transnationalism.

The constituent chapters in this volume highlight the variety of types, circumstances and geographical contexts for onward migration, alongside equally varied expressions of multi-sited transnationalism. Chapter authors emphasise the multidirectionality of transnational ties and the various ways of researching them. They unveil experiences from diverse spatial settings, including those in various destination countries, those ‘on the road’ and those who stay put in countries of origin. Authors also illustrate how the intensity of transnational connections evolves and is re-mapped over time, dependent not only on the sequence of onward moves but also on changing family and household composition in different locations as well as the changing aspirations of individuals and their wider families.

The chapters in this book were first presented and discussed at a double-session panel organised within the 17th IMISCOE Annual Conference, held online at the University of Luxembourg from 30 June to 2 July 2020. The online format worked vi Preface perfectly, and we thank the Luxembourg organisers for making the conference go ahead virtually. The overall theme of the IMISCOE conference was 'Crossing Borders, Connecting Cultures', and we felt that our workshop fitted nicely into the mission statement of the conference, which was 'to deepen our understanding of the complexity and diversity of migration experiences on the one hand and the possibilities of connecting different migrant experiences and groups of people on the other'. Following an open call for papers, we selected abstracts and papers which dealt with a variety of migrant categories, trajectories and geographical settings. Once the draft chapters were written, before or just after the conference, a constructive review process was put in place, whereby each chapter was reviewed by the two editors and one other anonymous chapter author from the book. We thank the chapter authors for their willing participation in this process, both as referees and as revisers of their own chapters. All chapters were subsequently reviewed by two anonymous referees and revised once more. We would also like to thank the referees for their critical remarks and constructive feedback for this edited volume.

Utrecht, The Netherlands Jill Ahrens

Brighton, Falmer, UK Russell King

Acknowledgement

Work on this edited book was made possible thanks to funding received from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant No. 706550. We thank the IMISCOE editorial board for granting this book a 75 per cent Open Access fee waiver, and we are indebted to Malmó University's Institute for Migration (MIM) for covering the remainder of the OA fee and enabling the book to benefit from the meticulous editorial work carried out by Jenny Money.

Contents

1 Onward Migration and Transnationalism: What Are the Interconnections? 22nizscoei4wpersterGszte5esecteeqQee3tkdesEs 1 Jill Ahrens and Russell King

2 Becoming Destination(s)? Complex Migration Trajectories, Marta Bivand Erdal, Lubomita Korzeniewska, and Davide Bertelli

3 For the Sake of Our Children? A Mixed-Methods Study of the Family Dynamics of Intra-European Mobility Among Somalis 253655558 sss RERRR SCR ASA RES EMAHSReERS CERES 45 Marloes de Hoon and Ilse van Liempt