Migrant Scholars Researching Migration Reflexivity, Subjectivity and Biography in Research

Dedication

List of figures

Acknowledgments

Notes on contributors

Foreword

CECILIA MENJÍVAR

Foreword

KENNETH J. GERGEN

Theoretical Introduction: Subjectivity, Reflexivity, and Affectivity as Research Processes

MARCO GEMIGNANI, YOLANDA HERNÁNDEZ-ALBÚJAR, AND JANA SLÁDKOVÁ

Introduction

MARCO GEMIGNANI, YOLANDA HERNÁNDEZ-ALBÚJAR, AND JANA SLÁDKOVÁ

PART I

Entanglements of Memories as Research 

1.      When we migrate

ANDREEA DECIU RITIVOI

2.      My poncho is a flamenco kimono

FERNANDO IWASAKI

3.      Wesearch: A Lao research scholar’s experience learning about and with her Southeast Asian American community

PHITSAMAY S. UY

4.      The process of becoming: An intimate and retrospective look at a 30-year journey of searching for a home 

VERONICA MONTES

5.      Looking for home: Reflections on an artistic process

PAVEL ROMANIKO

PART II

Negotiating belonging and identities in research

1. On not seeing oneself in the migration scholarship: Race and the struggle for belonging in the Indian diaspora

SUNIL BHATIA

1. In-between places: Negotiating (dis)advantage across national contexts

NIDA BIKMEN

1. Going from student to immigrant to citizen

ERNESTO CASTAÑEDA

1. Migration, narratives, and languages: Between life and work

ANNA DE FINA

1. Being a transnational language teacher educator and researcher: Borderlands, ideologies, and liminal identities

BEDRETTIN YAZAN

1. A transatlantic teacher educator: My life and career across two countries and languages

JOHANNA M. TIGERT

1. The research memoir of an intra-EU migrant who has become a guest in a settler colonial state

ANNA TRIANDAFYLLIDOU

PART III

Tensions of power in knowledge production

1. Bewilderment and illumination: Language as a tool to understand the migrant experience

LUKA LUCIĆ

1. Developing new approaches, stepping beyond categories: transnationalism and youth mobility trajectories in migration research

VALENTINA MAZZUCATO

1. From the “field” to the stage: A migration story

CAROLINA ALONSO BEJARANO

1. Can Black girls be transnational?

NAFEESAH ALLEN

1. From “second-generation immigrant” to sociologist of migration

MARCO MARTINIELLO

1. Keeping the struggle alive: A methodologically disobedient essay

ALI KONYALI

Conclusions: Towards New Ways of Knowing

MARCO GEMIGNANI, YOLANDA HERNÁNDEZ-ALBÚJAR, AND JANA SLÁDKOVÁ

Index

Biography

Marco Gemignani is Associate Professor/Reader in the Psychology Department at Universidad Loyola in Seville, Spain, where he specializes in qualitative methodologies, clinical community psychology, and cultural psychology. He is a former president of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology and actively collaborates with numerous qualitative journals, associations, and research centers in psychology. His interests are in innovative critical methodologies and narrativeconstructivist psychotherapies, which he applies mostly in the field of migration studies. His most recent research projects concern transnational families, collective traumatic memories, and the psychosocial dimensions of the irregularization of migration.

Yolanda Hernández-Albújar works at Universidad Loyola Andalucía, in Seville, where she teaches courses in Cultural Anthropology, Migration, and Gender. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh and a master´s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida. She explores, from a cultural perspective, issues of identity, migration, and gender. She specializes in qualitative and visual methodologies and collaborates with various journals and associations. She is now the principal investigator in two projects regarding migrants in Latin America.

Jana Sládková is an Associate Professor of critical social psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, USA. She is a qualitative researcher with expertise in narrative inquiry. Her focus of inquiry is on migration issues of unauthorized migrants, and racial/ethnic diversity and inclusion in higher education in the United States. She is the author of Journeys of Undocumented Honduran Migrants to the United States and numerous peer-reviewed articles. Her latest projects include Participatory Action Research with adult immigrant English learners in Massachusetts and celebrating Latinx communities in New England, USA.

“A substantial, complex, and intimate conversation(s) and reflections around migration and migration’s subjectivities […]. It is impossible to remain indifferent to the complexity presented by the authors of this book. The tensions, questions, and thoughts they evoke lead us not to concrete answers, but to complex thinking, rumination, and the production of knowledge. This significant work advances methodological thinking rather than merely addressing Migration Inquiry […]. A must read for authors who live, think, breathe, research and (re)define what we live/call migration.” - Giazú Enciso Dominguez, University of Houston – Clear Lake, USA

“Migrant Scholars Researching Migration offers readers a curious double fold (of migration) and examples of migration studying itself (plural). International migrant scholars including the editors have generated theoretically engaging and reflexive accounts of migration, time-space-positionalities, and migration’s different forms. Diverse bio-contexts and bio-elements form a relational continuum of shifting migration and relational subjectivities. This book invites readers to live the affects of migration and experience the migrant (worlds of) difference.” - Mirka Koro, Arizona State University, USA