Suchergebnisse

Forced migration - including refugee flows, asylum seekers, internal displacement and development-induced displacement - has increased considerably in volume and political significance since the end of the Cold War. It has become an integral part of North-South relationships and is closely linked to current processes of global social transformation. This makes it as important for sociologists to develop empirical research and analysis on forced migration as it is to include it in their theoretical understandings of contemporary society. The study of forced migration is linked to research on economic migration, but has its own specific research topics, methodological problems and conceptual issues. Forced migration needs to be analysed as a social process in which human agency and social networks play a major part. It gives rise to fears of loss of state control, especially in the context of recent concerns about migration and security. In this context, it is essential to question earlier sociological approaches, which have been based on the principle of relatively autonomous national societies. The sociology of forced migration must be a transnational and interdisciplinary undertaking.

AbstractSociologists of gender and Latina/o migration and Chicana feminist scholars in Chicana/o Studies have made extensive interventions in the academic project of recovering the experiences of women in migration studies across disciplines. I consider these contributions and advocate for an interdisciplinary research agenda that continues expanding relational scholarship by developing the concept of the politics of erased migrations, an analytical tool to theorize why and how the embodied experiences of Latinas are marginalized and misrepresented in academic research. Latinas experience various physical and symbolic migrations—across and within national borders, social and political contexts, identities, academic disciplines, methodologies, and social movements. Yet Latina feminist experiences, knowledge, and political movement largely remain at the margins of these borders. Through a review of prominent research on gender and migration centered on heteronormativity, reproduction, and the nation‐state, I demonstrate the possibilities of the politics of erased migration as a theoretical intervention in expanding a relational, intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration. This paper carries implications for shifting the field of Latinx gender and migration from a focus on current oppressive conditions to one that also imagines new avenues for social justice and alternative social worlds.

Research in Rural Sociology and Development: Focus on Migration, edited by Harry K. Schwarzweller and Brendan P. Mullan.Population Change in the Rural West: 1975–1990, edited by John M. Wardwell and James H. Copp. Lanham, MDCommunity of Strangers: Change, Turnover, Turbulence and the Transformation of a Midwestern Country Town, by Joseph A. Amato and John Radzilowski.

An unexamined problem in the history of American sociology is how to understand cross-societal transference of theoretical structures. The case study considered here is that of the cultural migration of refugee scholars from Nazi Germany to the United States. This paper treats this event as a problem in the sociology of theory structures. Habermas' work on the social character of scientific knowledge aids in conceptualizing our frame work.

Books reviewed in this article:John Urry, Sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the twenty‐first century, New York and London: RoutledgeNikos Papastergiadis, The turbulence of migration: globalization, deterritorialization and hybridityStephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and migration: globalization and the politics of belonging