Giuseppe Sciortino, Martina Cvajner et al. (Hrsg.): Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration
Rezensiert von Iuliana Ancuţa Ilie, 04.07.2024
Giuseppe Sciortino, Martina Cvajner, Peter J. Kivisto (Hrsg.): Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration. Edward Elgar Publishing (Cheltenham Glos GL50 1UA UK) 2024. ISBN 978-1-83910-546-3. 59,91 EUR.
Theme
The volume „Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration“ is part of the „Research Handbooks in Sociology series“ containing no less than 15 other books on subjects such as globalization, health and medicine, intersectionality, the sociology of organizations, etc. Edited by Giuseppe Sciortino and Martina Cvajner from the University of Trento, Italy, and Peter J. Kivisto from the Augustana College, USA, the book contains 34 contributions providing often a state-of-the-art overview of migration related aspects as dealt with within the sociology of migration.
Tracing and placing migration as a subfield in the discipline of sociology, Cvajner, Kivisto and Sciortino acknowledge in the introductory chapter that is not the lack of, but rather the wealth of sociological research on this topic, that determined them to publish a handbook on the sociology of migration. They aim to provide a comprehensive guide to sociological research on migration, encompassing information on the existing theories, trends and perspectives, on the field’s achievements and, whenever possible, on potential research directions. The editors emphasize four features, which are important in the sociological study of international migration:
- First, migration is seen as an interactive process (p.7). (Here the authors refer to the decision-making process which involves not only the migrants themselves but also those around them – family members, neighbors, other members of their communities, networks, etc.).
- Second, the authors underline the adjacent idea of crossing social and cultural boundaries – language, religion, sexual identity, ethnicity, etc. – and what this means in terms of belonging and membership (pp. 7–8).
- Third, the authors underscore the entanglement of various institutional factors (p. 8) which can influence processes of inclusion and exclusion.
- The fourth and last characteristic mentioned by Cvajner, Kivisto, and Sciortino is the relevance of migration regimes (p.8).
For the editors, these four characteristics contribute to „a distinctive way of looking at migration“ (p. 7).
Editors
Giuseppe Sciortino is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy [1]. In 2021 Sciortino published another edited volume – „Populism in the Civil Sphere“ – with the renowned American sociologist, Jeffrey C. Alexander and Peter J. Kivisto. He currently leads the research project „The Children of Immigrants Have Grown Up. The transition to adulthood for youth with a migratory background“ funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR).
Martina Cvajner is an Associate Professor at the University of Trento, Italy [2]. Her major book is „Soviet Signoras. Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration“ (2019), a highly acclaimed scholarly work for which she won several awards (among them – the „Best Book Award“ from the International Sociological Association (ISA)). She is currently involved in „Rethinking Inclusion and Gender empowerment: A participatory action research“ (ReIncluGen), a project funded under the Horizon Europe program.
Peter J. Kivisto is the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought Emeritus at Augustana College in the US state of Illinois. He authored and edited many books, among them the above mentioned „Populism in the Civil Sphere“ (2021), „The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory“ (2020), „Beyond a Border. The Causes and Consequences of Contemporary Immigration“ (2009), etc.
Structure of the book
The edited volume „Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration“ is divided into three parts:
- Part I gathers under the title „Key concepts“ 16 chapters that present and discuss categories, concepts, theories, and „turns“ in migration studies.
- Part II (containing 7 chapters) touches upon both qualitative and quantitative „Methods and techniques“, some fairly standard, such as ethnography and specialized surveys on migration, others relatively new, relying for instance on big data, etc., and used in digital migration studies (DMS).
- Part III (consisting of 11 chapters) explores specific „Sites, Places, and Spheres“ of migration by looking at sending communities, labor markets, religious aspects, policy aspects, and others.
Content – selected chapters
Six of the book’s chapters will be summarized in the following (two from each part of the book). They were selected to give an insight into the types of topics covered in the handbook and how they were tackled by their authors. Further, authorship was taken into consideration – the aim was to present chapters written by the editors themselves as well as by the contributors to this volume. As with other collections, the quality of the individual contributions can oscillate from very good to less good. This is also true of the chapters presented here.
In the chapter entitled „Mobility, immobility, and migration“ Nicolas DeMaria Harney provides an informative overview of the mobilities paradigm, its emergence and transformation into a mobility turn, as well as the reverberations of mobility as a framework for analyzing migration.
He starts first by shortly presenting the entangled meanings of migration (often understood as the movement of people across borders) and mobility (which refers to both human and non-human movements – e.g. of goods, technology, etc.) and shows how thin the line can be between mobility, immobility and migration. He outlines how migration was incorporated into the field of mobility studies, in which researchers concentrate according to Harney on mainly five modes of mobility (p. 14):
- corporeal travel (referring to people moving for various purposes),
- physical mobility of objects (people are here involved as producers, consumers, etc.),
- imaginative travel (looks at how people are influenced by media consumption),
- virtual travel (determined by technological advancement), and
- communicative travel (also related to and influenced by technology).
Harney shows that placing movement at the core of sociological research is actually not that new and suggests that „[p]roponents of the mobility turn may connect to, and rely upon a long tradition, dating back to the nineteenth century“ (p. 15). In this regard, he brings evidence from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Georg Simmel, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, and others. In the assessment of mobility’s analytical value, Harney highlights how mobility’s strength (its broader frame of investigating movement in relation to and across various domains) can be also a weakness as „the conflation of many types of movement glossed as mobility (and immobility) smooths out the variety and specificity of the world of people and things in motion across neutral space“ (p. 17). Harney suggests that a promising research direction within a mobility frame would be the analysis of the nexus of migration trajectories and state surveillance in light of the increased technological advancements.
In the same section dedicated to key concepts, the editor, Giuseppe Sciortino, discusses in „Borders and boundaries“ the importance of political borders and social and cultural boundaries in the process of migration. He puts forward that while state borders are often the most visible elements in regulating migration, migrants cross (additionally to international borders) „a variety of symbolic and social boundaries“ (p. 26). Sciortino highlights the importance of Aristide Zolberg’s 1981 article in channeling the sociological interest in political borders and their effects on the movements of the population. He also points out that borders are not and should not be understood as simple lines separating one territory from another, as border policies can operate outside (externalization of borders) and inside the territory of a state (internalization of borders).
According to Sciortino sociologists acknowledged only late the importance of political borders, but equally important for a comprehensive understanding of international migration are in his view social boundaries and their negotiation. He subsequently reviews the main contributions in the field of cultural sociology with a focus on boundary and boundary-making and pleads for an attentive examination of the interplay between political borders, social categories, and symbolic categories.
The sociology of migration draws on various methodological approaches that are used in sociology more broadly, as well as in other disciplines, such as anthropology. For instance, Martina Cvajner presents in her chapter „Ethnography in migration studies: an everlasting love“ the main principles of ethnography. She builds on her own experience to illustrate how ethnography can be employed in research projects and what difficulties might arise. Furthermore, she summarizes five books tackling migration based on ethnographic fieldwork. Regardless of the various forms an ethnography can take, the fundamental feature of ethnography that Cvajner underlines in her chapter is observation: „Ethnography is, first and foremost, the systematic study of people, sites, and cultures through direct observation. […] Without such sustained observational activity, with all its accompanying pleasures and boredoms, calling one’s work ‘ethnographic’ is—at best—a misnomer“ (p. 217; emphasis in original). Though fraught with many challenges that Cvajner skillfully describes, ethnographic fieldwork can bring about complex and nuanced understandings of the observed social interactions and practices. To offer an insight into the breadth of results when using an ethnographic approach in the sociology of migration, Cvajner discusses in the last part of the chapter the following five ethnographies:
- „Romanians in Western Europe“ (2013) by Remus Gabriel Anghel (he also authored one of the book’s chapters in this edited volume),
- „The Big Gamble: The Migration of Eritreans to Europe“ (2019) by Milena Belloni,
- „Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants“ (2006) by Robert Smith,
- „A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families“ (2003) by Jennifer Hirsh and
- „Maid to Order in Hong Kong“ (1997) by Nicole Constable.
Leaving the terrain of qualitative research and the related challenges as described for ethnographic studies, Erik Vickstrom and Cris Beauchemin offer in the chapter „Quantitative surveys on migration“ instructive insights into the conceptualization, definitional issues as well as strengths and limitations of specialized surveys of international migration. As there are many types of surveys, the two authors explain first the conditions that a survey should meet to be relevant for the study of international migration:
- it should contain questions concerning migrants,
- the number of migrants in the survey sample should be statistically significant and
- it should „adopt a geographic point of view“ (p. 227) by focusing either on the departure or on the destination country of migrants.
Further considerations must be given when choosing among various definitions available for international migrants, types of migration (short-term, long-term, etc.), the implications of collecting data on immigrants at destination or of emigrants at origin should be pondered, etc. Vickstrom and Beauchemin enhance the descriptions of terminological decisions and their definitional choices with examples of surveys (e.g., The New Immigrant Survey – NIS, in the USA, Trajectories and Origin survey – TeO, in France, etc.). In addition, they address the importance of collecting data in different countries and show how multi-sited approaches can be integrated into the design of surveys on migration. As the two authors underline also the relevance of longitudinal data, they shed light on panel and biographic surveys, two possible approaches to follow migrants over time and thus to better grasp the changes in migration trajectories and other migration-related aspects. In the final section of their chapter, Vickstrom and Beauchemin summarize some general requirements and challenges alike of specialized migration surveys and while acknowledging the imperfection of this method, they recommend researchers and survey designers to assess always both the advantages and disadvantages of their methodological choices and of the data they produce, a stance that Vickstrom and Beauchemin follow throughout their chapter.
Having provided the reader with the theoretical and methodological tools for investigating migration in the first two parts of the book, the contributions in the third part deal with the implications of migration in various contexts.
Mattia Vitiello, for instance, attempts to examine the effects of migration on labor markets and workplaces. In his chapter „Workplaces and labor markets“ he gives a brief overview of the main economic theories that try to explain migration as determined by income and employment opportunities differentials and assume individuals to be rational agents. Vitiello considers labor markets as paramount in the integration of migrants and he shortly presents discriminatory aspects with which immigrant workers are confronted at the workplace. The author includes in his review some contributions within the neoclassical economic theory, Michael J. Piorre’s dual labor market theory, the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM) approach, and some others. Concerning the labor market integration of migrants, different aspects such as the economic performance of immigrants, their skills’ complementarity with the local workforce, etc. are briefly introduced. Discrimination issues and how they are tackled by companies (for instance through diversity management) are also succinctly discussed. Vitiello raises awareness on the sociological investigative approach (other researchers use the expression „workers’ inquiry“) aimed at exploring social relations in the workplace as being an important contribution of the Italian Raniero Panzieri.
Aleksandra Kubica in her chapter „Migration, museums, (and archives)“ approaches migration from a somewhat different perspective by investigating how migration as a topic entered the field of museology, what narratives migration museums promote, and through which means. She looks particularly at the changes that took place in the museum landscape of the last decades and she connects the mission envisaged by most migration museums today with the „new museology“ movement. Based on the literature on museology, Kubica points to the role played by museums in the nineteenth century in fostering national ideologies, feelings of belonging, and national identity. The new museology movement born in the second half of the twentieth-century places at the center of museums’ activity visitors (instead of the collections) and asks how museums can go beyond nation-state narratives and reflect the cosmopolitan or multicultural aspects of the world. Moreover, museums seem to have adopted inclusiveness, openness, and a participatory stance in their projects and exhibitions and to take on „a role as agents of social change“ (Sandel, 2002, 2007 cited in Kubica, 2024, p. 412). Consequently, (and also due to the salience in media and political discourse) migration became a topic for existing museums and their archives, and also for newly created museums dedicated exclusively to various forms of migration. Among the migration museums that she mentions are: the Emigration Museum in Gdynia, Poland, the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris, the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp, the famous Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York, etc.
Kubica identifies two prevalent features in the design of exhibitions: the use of interactive technologies that supposedly increase visitors’ empathy and the strong reliance of migration museums on individual life stories and oral history interviews. In addition, she draws attention to two important aspects that require critical reflection: the entanglement between museums and their archives and the role played by archivists and curators in selecting, interpreting, and presenting certain stories.
Discussion
The edited volume „Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration” brings together a wide range of scholars (sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, demographers) – some at the beginning of their career, others well-known authors – to address and shed light on the main theories, concepts, methodologies, and contexts of migration. The chapters cover fundamental topics in the sociology of migration and provide good overviews of key and up-to-date sources facilitating an informed understanding of how migration aspects have been tackled over time. Moreover, some chapters explore similar migration issues from different perspectives, which enhances the overall quality of the book. While some of the contributions offer basic knowledge on migration, it is often the authors’ writing style and the critical evaluation of the scholarly literature that make these texts good starting points for further inquiry for students of sociology and adjacent disciplines. Some chapters, however, read as fairly standard literature reviews, while others fail to connect the presented theories with their main topic. Furthermore, the book would have profited from a short description of its internal logic and potential relations among chapters.
Summary
On the whole, the volume provides a good synthesis of the subfield of sociology of migration and the similar structure of the chapters testify to the editors’ care in ensuring consistency throughout the book.
[1] For more information on Sciortino‘s teaching and research activities see his profile on the website of the University of Trento: https://webapps.unitn.it/du/en/Persona/PER0004936/Curriculum (Retrieved May 20, 2024).
[2] For more information on Cvajner‘s teaching and research activities see her profile on the website of the University of Trento: https://webapps.unitn.it/du/en/Persona/PER0028028/Didattica (Retrieved May 20, 2024).
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Iuliana Ancuţa Ilie
Forschungsreferentin an der Hochschule Pforzheim und Doktorandin an der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät, Universität Innsbruck
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