Introduction: Rethinking Migration - Challenging Borders, Citizenship, Race

This introduction describes the aims of the volume as supporting the development of new thinking about migration and demonstrating how academic research can contribute to practice and new thinking without conforming to a policy agenda or reifying policy categories. The chapter first considers the fuzziness of the category of ‘migrant’ before going on to explore three interrelated questions. First, which movements matter, when and why? Second, how are we to denaturalize international borders? Third, having problematized and complicated ideas of ‘migration’, what are we to do with ‘migration’? It then describes the volume’s approach, what seeks to avoid positioning ‘the migrant’ as an inherently exceptional and problematic subject and analyses human movement within a much broader historical and contemporary landscape of social processes and relations. It goes on to outline the volume’s parts and chapters, pointing out how they exemplify responses to these questions and help us rethink migration and mobilities. It argues that conceptually based, critical and creative thinking is as important for practice as it is for theory and can help us understand and respond to migration as a force that connects rather than divides.