“Migration: The COMPAS Anthology” is intended to inform and provoke. By inform we mean that we want to provide a source of materials for people interested in work that takes migration as its focus, easily accessible for both academic and non-academic audiences, individual readers, civil society organisations, community groups and NGOs with an interest in migration. It includes a range of scholarship addressing topics in the UK and across the globe. We hope it will be useful for school and university teachers as a readily available resource base to access to some of the more recent writing in migration studies from a range of international scholars. We have used a creative commons license for the collection that has both a practical and an ethical dimension.
By provoke we mean that we want people to challenge their own assumptions, perhaps reflecting on the common sense of migration stories in popular media and conventional scholarship. Migration itself is a slippery term, mutable in its definition, as likely to invoke old 'self-evident' truths as much as new thoughts. We are not arguing a case 'for' or 'against' migration as such but instead trying to make people reflect on how mobility makes us reconsider our own lives and our relationships to others, to turn our private thoughts into public concerns.
We argue that migration is not only about those who move. The study of migration should not be solely about the measurement and containment of countable numbers of migrants. Migration is about those who stay as well as those who go; the consequences for the left behind, the new arrivals and those who find their neighbourhood or their city transformed as a result of rapid demographic change prompted by new arrivals or long term departures. It is about how people manage to get by in a world that is changing so fast, connections that draw people much closer in time and space through technologies of travel, virtual presence and mediated global links. But it is also about how these patterns of spatial proximity are sometimes coupled with separations of ever greater social distances through multiple forms of economic, cultural and political polarisation.
We do not pretend this collection to be comprehensive. Some areas of the globe are covered more exhaustively than others, with British concerns disproportionately present. The anthology publication is part of the COMPAS 10th birthday celebrations and the collection focuses principally on writing of COMPAS scholars, our research collaborators and authors we admire. But we have suggested some routes out of the volume, both in terms of key past writing on migration and some reflections of the themes that emerge from the collection.
We have combined poetry and prose, practical pieces and theoretical reflections, personal with statistical description, to reflect this sense of disturbance. Through its multiplicity we hope that people will explore the collection for those things that interest them most or that they find most useful.
