XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

JS-84

Integrating International Migration into the Mainstream Social Theorizing

RC31 Sociology of Migration (host committee)
RC16 Sociological Theory

Language: English

As a constitutive component of globalization and the discontents it generates, international migration (thereafter IM) articulates major transformations of the contemporary world. Yet the study of IM—a scholarly specialization of its own in most social-science disciplines-- has become largely nichified within its own field-specific agendas, meetings, journals, and research networks. We believe it is high time to make international migration into a base concept-reference in the conceptualization of mainstream social-science representations of society and its individual and institutional actors.  A perusal of the themes of the  articles published in two main social theory journals since 2010--Sociological Theory and the European Journal of Social Theory—reveals at least three concerns shared by these two fields of sociological study: (super-)diversity of present-day urban settings and its implications for people’s everyday existence and the legal-political systems which frame it; the ‘glocal(ization)’ processes or simultaneous homogenization and heterogenization of individual lifestyles and social institutions; and the mechanisms, displays, and consequences of the revival/persistence of religion in the contemporary world. There are, we are sure, more issues/questions social theorists and IM specialists share an interest in. This session is intended to give voice to ways of formulating them through propositions that incorporate processes of international migration into mainstream social-theoretical concepts/models.