Migration Across Boundaries : Linking Research to Practice and Experience

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplinary backgrounds working in Europe, North and South America, South Asia and the Middle East, this volume explores the question of how to ensure that migration research feeds back into improving the lives of migrants. It emphasises the necessarily interdisciplinary and cross-boundary nature of migration research, offering methodological recommendations to anyone studying or working in the field, and showing how migration studies can usefully affect real contexts by better exploring the potential that exists for both bridging academic disciplines and building links with work that occurs beyond strictly academic forums. Organised around the themes of methodological considerations and interdisciplinary approaches, the experiences of migrants as researchers and interaction between practitioners, policy-makers and academics, Migration Across Boundaries discusses the realities of the discourses that surround international migration, examining the proper role of academia in bringing together a range of stakeholders to formulate dialogic approaches to understanding migration. An international and interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding of how research in migration can be brought to bear on the experiences of migrants and linked to the work of activists, artists and policy-makers, this book will appeal not only to scholars and students of migration across the social sciences, but also to those working in the fields of migrant advocacy and activism.

Parvati Nair is Director of the United Nations University institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility and Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. She is the author of A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado, of Rumbo al norte: inmigración y movimientos culturales entre el Magreb y España and of Configuring Community: Theories, Narratives and Practices of Community Identities in Contemporary Spain, and co-editor of Gender and Spanish Cinema and Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Critical Discourses and Cinematic Practices. She is also the Principal Editor of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture.

Tendayi Bloom is Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility.