This Handbook offers a comprehensive collection of essays that cover essential features of geographical mobility, from internal migration, to international migration, to urbanization, to the adaptation of migrants in their destinations. Part I of the collection introduces the range of theoretical perspectives offered by several social science disciplines, while also examining the crucial relationship between internal and international migration. Part II takes up methods, ranging from how migration data are best collected to contemporary techniques for analyzing such data. Part III of the handbook contains summaries of present trends across all world regions. Part IV rounds out the volume with several contributions assessing pressing issues in contemporary policy areas. The volume’s editor Michael J. White has spent a career studying the pattern and process of internal and international migration, urbanization and population distribution in a wide variety of settings, from developing societies to advanced economies. In this Handbook he brings together contributors from all parts of the world, gathering in this one volume both geographical and substantive expertise of the first rank. The Handbook will be a key reference source for established scholars, as well as an invaluable high-level introduction to the most relevant topics in the field for emerging scholars.
Michael J White is the Robert E. Turner Distinguished Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Sociology at Brown University, where he is also an affiliate and past director of the Population Studies and Training Center. White is also Honorary Research Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and he has served the Population Association of America and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population in a variety of capacities. White’s own research on migration and population distribution covers a wide array of topics, from urban residential segregation, to rural-urban migration in developing societies, to contemporary international migration and immigrant assimilation. His studies span most world regions and both developing and developed settings. Other recent books include Achieving Anew: How New Immigrants Doin American Schools, Jobs, and Neighborhoods (with J Glick; Russell Sage, 2009) and The Dynamics of Migration, Health and Livelihoods (co-edited with M Collinson, K Adazu, and S Findley; Ashgate, 2009). White is currently investigating the role that interregional migration plays in influencing health outcomes in South Africa.
