The Southern Responses to Displacement project is pleased to announce that the Open Access Special Issue 3 of Migration and Society, examining the question of “Recentering the South in Studies of Migration,” is now available to read here. The issue examines this question by asking: What does it mean to “recenter” that which has, and those who have, been placed and kept at the margins? Whose voices and perspectives should be involved in recentering? And to what or who does “the South” refer in such contested domains?
As Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh argues in the introduction to this volume – which you can also read in abridged form here – , rather than advocating for one particular conceptualization or enactment of “recentering the South,” the articles published in this special issue highlight diverse ways of approaching the study of migration in relation to the so-called global South.
This ranges from documenting diverse dynamics of migration in the South and of South-South migration, to exploring how international agencies aim to promote South-South cooperation, to “centering” previously marginalized actors in order to critically examine concepts, policies, and programs developed by and for European states and international intergovernmental organizations (which remain Northern-led), to reflecting on the geopolitics of knowledge and the potential for Southern, decolonial, and anticolonial ways of knowing, being in, and responding to the world, including through artistic practice and knowledge.
In this sense, this special issue of Migration and Society is closely linked to the Southern Responses to Displacement research project combines attention to a particular directionality of both forced migration—from Syria to the neighboring “Southern” states of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey—and of responses to this displacement—by organizations, states, groups, and individuals from “the South,” while simultaneously critically examining the diverse ways that “the South” is understood, mobilized, and indeed resisted by differently positioned people, and tracing the power relations underpinning and emerging through and from these processes of migration, response and conceptualization.
Read Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s introduction to the special issue here, and the Southern Responses to Displacement blog series, Thinking through the Global South here, which will also be featuring abridged versions of selected articles from the journal special issue over the coming weeks.
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Featured image: Luthuli Avenue, central Nairobi, a street where electronics are sold, many sourced through Somali networks, as well as through Chinese distributors. (c) N. Carrier, 2011.
Southern Responses to Displacement 