Migrant Politics and Mobilisation: Exclusion, Engagements, Incorporation

In recent years immigration and the integration of migrants and minorities have become politicised in public and policy debates in Britain, the rest of Europe and the United States. In such debates, migrants are commonly treated as objects of politics and spoken in terms of management, national interest, control and contention. This treatment has characterised not only policy makers and politicians but also many academics. Existing scholarly research on migrants as subjects of politics is limited and largely carried out through detached and structural approaches. These approaches have focused on the institutional environments in which mobilisations develop. They have, however, overlooked migrants’ conditions, experiences, subjectivities and practices as well as the focus of their engagement.

This volume contributes to the study of migrants’ mobilisation through theoretically informed original empirical papers focusing on current forms and aspects of migrants and minorities practices of citizenship in an engaged and people-centred manner. In particular, the book addresses issues of change both in the forms assumed by migrants’ and minorities political engagements and in the transformations these engagements produce as well as exclusion-inclusion dynamics that migrants experience with regard to the political process and more generally.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Davide Però is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Nottingham where he convenes the Identity, Citizenship and Migration Centre. Previously he was a Researcher at the ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. He has conducted ethnographic research on politics and migrants in Britain, Italy and Spain and is currently interested in migrants’ practices of citizenship and policy change from below. He is the author of the monograph Inclusionary Rhetoric/Exclusionary Practices: Left-wing Politics and Migrants in Italy (Berghahn, 2007) and of several journal articles.

John Solomos is Professor of Sociology at City University London. Before that he was Professor of Sociology at South Bank University, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Southampton, and has worked at the ESRC Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Aston and Warwick and the Department of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London.