Rethinking migration beyond the analytics of suffering

In their search for better lives, migrants encounter numerous hardships. Structural violence, inequality, and precarity have long been central to migration research, but an exclusive focus on these dimensions risks narrowing the anthropological imagination and overlooking the reasons why many move in the first place. The contributions to this special issue examine how migrants navigate moral dilemmas and pursue meaningful lives by reflecting on value and well-being, through the lens of humor and irony, and by improvisation. Taken together, the articles propose a reorientation of migration studies that foregrounds ethnographic attention to moral experience and ordinary ethical life while remaining attuned to the structural conditions that shape mobility and immobility.