Timespace and International Migration

'Like the city, the nation, life itself, migration has become increasingly diverse. This stimulating, multi-disciplinary edited collection looks at questions about the connections between time, space and migration at a variety of scales and across a range of sites. Rhythms, patterns and scales of permanent, cyclical and temporary migration are explored in fascinating detail, providing new insights into an increasingly important phenomenon in a globalising world. This collection will reset the agenda for migration studies.'
- Linda McDowell, University of Oxford, UK

Seeking to re-energise debates on the relationship between human mobility and timespace, this book furthers our understanding of how people move by foregrounding both time and space in the analysis of different empirical migration stories. Though migration is often seen as inherently spatial, the way space is being imagined is rarely analysed, whilst questions of time are widely neglected by migration scholars. Here, in contrast, the idea of timespace is used to assert the significance and connections of these two dimensions. The focus is on how timespace intersects with dynamic migrant constructions, negotiations and performances as an integral aspect of the rhythms of mobilities.

Highlighting migration journeys and emotions as embedded and embodied in everyday lives, the chapters also examine the intricate and complex ways timespace enters into, and is juxtaposed with, such feelings and practices in different spaces. Migrations and mobilities are not seen as one-off, separate processes, suspended in timespace, but rather need to be theorised and analysed in more innovative and malleable ways which take into account the non-linear, non-teleological, ambivalent, irrational, messy and fluid ways in which people move.

Individual chapters engage with these concepts by considering a broad spectrum of migration stories, from youth mobility, to refugee migration, to gentrification, to food and to the political geography of the border. The overall aim of the book is to interrupt and challenge the ways in which migration scholars use time and space within their research.

Contributors include: E. Ascensão, J. Carling, A. Christou, F. Collins, M.B. Erdal, M. Griffiths, A. Ma, E. Mavroudi, J. McGarrigle, P. Novak, B. Page, S. Shubin, D. Smith, H. Zaban