The State of Migration Theory: Challenges, Interdisciplinarity, and Critique

Reflecting on the changing historical backdrop to the various editions of Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines, this post-script offers a brief introduction to the new generations of critical migration studies that have emerged across disciplines, from outside of the migration studies paradigm mostly represented in this volume. It explains the turn to highly politicized and activist-driven critiques of the modes of liberal democratic thinking about migration and immigration, which have been exposed as often reproducing techniques of governmental power in the management of populations nationally and internationally. It also addresses the charge of “denying race” in migration studies or that the field is too “white,” while suggesting ways in which the field is being transformed by reflecting on migration in the Global South, or (especially) the Global East. It ends with a short sketch of what the author refers to as the study of “political demography”: reframing migration and mobilities studies in line with the critique of critical migration studies and decolonial theory more generally.