ABSTRACT
Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships between the changing ways migration is viewed by states, political actors, and researchers and the reorganization of intersecting, globe-spanning, multiscalar networks of power, dispossession, and desire. Challenging the separation of studies of migration, including its transnational processes, from analyses of the restructuring of the global capitalist economy, the chapter argues that such restructuring is simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural process in which we are all actors and subjects. The chapter frames the contemporary moment of reorganization within an overview of migration in human history and the formation of migration regimes. This stance discards the binary between mobility and stasis and migrants and non-migrants. It helps situate the rise and fall of transnational studies within specific conjunctural transformations of the networks within which capital and power are accumulated and legitimated. The epistemological approach to migration also makes visible the processes that are constituting a dispossariat, producing political rage globally, and fueling authoritarian racialized nationalism. At the same time, this approach highlights the processes that are dispossessing both people classified as migrant and non-migrants, which creates the basis of a politics of equality, social justice, and climate action.
