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Human mobility is often framed through national, international, and transnational scales that tend to naturalize borders, territories, and mobility categories. Such perspectives often produce homogenizing understandings of the forcibly displaced subject, whether a refugee, an asylum seeker, an exile, an internally displaced person, a deportee, or a migrant in transit, reducing the complexity of their experiences and agency to standardized narratives of crisis, vulnerability, and security. Ingeniously, migration reveals a productive co-constituted relation with space-making politics, since it actively co-produces and transforms the landscapes, borders, and sociopolitical worlds through which it unfolds.
This panel aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on methodological approaches and tools for studying the spectrum of human mobility in the Americas, with attention to diverse migratory experiences, processes, and trajectories. It examines how migration intersects with democratic governance, citizenship claims, border regimes, and the production of legitimate and contested public and international policies in contexts marked by uncertainty and complex social dynamics, highlighting the time-space-landscape nexus and its multiple political implications.
It welcomes contributions that explore migration as lived through embodied, emotional, material, symbolic, and spatial experiences. By moving beyond rigid ontological boundaries and state-centered, institutionally driven representations, it seeks to explore how diverse methodologies can recreate the heterogeneous realities of (im)mobility across the Americas.
Attention will be given to approaches that foreground migrants’ perspectives, memories, trajectories, and forms of agency. Critical cartographies, ethnographic research, oral history, participatory methodologies, visual and digital approaches, geospatial analysis, memory studies, and mixed-methods design offer important tools for visibilizing migrant experiences and revealing modes of exclusion from mainstream governance and policy-oriented frameworks. Such approaches create innovative possibilities for capturing the multiple dimensions of migration, including its physical, psychological, political, and affective manifestations and interactions.
The panel welcomes reflections on the ethical and epistemological challenges of researching migration, bringing together scholars from different disciplines and generations to advance methodological debates and critical understandings of the diverse mobilities, landscapes, and experiences that shape migration throughout the Americas and their implications for a field in motion that requires inventiveness in its non-linear life cycle.