The Social Construction of Migrants: Contested (Hi-)Stories of Migration from the Perspective of Biographical Research

This session focuses on migration as a category of everyday life in different geographical contexts of the Global North and the Global South. On the one hand, migrations in the sense of spatial movements are universal phenomena in human history. On the other hand, constructions of migration – and especially "migrants" – are shaped by the emergence of statehood, border and citizenship regimes, and nationalized discourses of belonging, which are in turn entangled with global history and (post-)colonial modernity. The "comings and goings" of people in the past and in the present are negotiated differently in discourses, stocks of knowledge, and collective memories in different contexts (whether as a problem, a necessity, something normal, a tradition, to name just a few possibilities). There are great differences in respect of whether the category “migrant” serves as a symbolic boundary.

We invite papers that use qualitative approaches to study processes and constellations in the Global South and the Global North, in which constructions and (hi-)stories of migration are contested, negotiated, and transformed within everyday life figurations. The papers can relate to these suggested topics:

• Contested knowledges: How is migration-related knowledge produced, reproduced, or transformed in different localized or transnational collectives (such as families, generations, social movements, etc.)?
• Contested (hi-)stories: Whose experiences are presented and remembered as migration histories (or not) in different contexts and situations (e.g. in discourses, in asylum interviews, during fieldwork)?
• (De-)Categorization of migration: Which meanings do migration categorizations have for "migrants" in different periods of their lives?