Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Migration has proved to be one of the most turbulent and productive spheres of anthropological – and cultural/social scientific – inquiry. It has contributed a lot to moving our methodological focus towards mobility and transnationalism – away from former methodological nationalism and localism.

Still, migration research in its more narrow sense has not profited much from the theoretical moves which it has inspired. Migration research, however transnational and diasporic it may be today, still tends to restrict itself to the research of migrants – thus reproducing the marginal space of a specific field of interest at the periphery of the ethnically, racially unmarked landscapes of „mainstream research“.

We aim to take migration further: not only as a concept to study „ethnic“, „transnational“, „diasporic“ - and thus marginalized - groups of people, but as a concept that has to be generally employed in the study of societies, cultures, cities, genders, classes, states.

In other words: Could the concept of migration be turned into a „traveling theory“ (Edward Said) that would gain different productivity from being transferred from the margins to the centre?