Migration infrastructures have usually been identified with stable sociomaterial arrangements controlling migration (e.g. airports and detention camps), stressing highly stratified power geometries and hierarchies. Recent debates about arrival infrastructures, however, have highlighted the informal, ephemeral and improvisational character of 'bottom-up' infrastructures. Departing from a widened understanding of infrastructure, this paper looks at migrants' businesses as urban infrastructures assembling various kinds of mobilities. In particular, we address small businesses established by Senegalese migrants in Brazil, and Brazilianowned cafés in Portugal. We approach these businesses as urban infrastructures where different forms of mobilities overlap and interact, exposing various trajectories and scales of circulation. While the businesses in Brazil cater mainly for Senegalese and other migrants' needs (money transfer, ICTs, and job offers), the Brazilian-owned coffee shops in Portugal function as sites of co-working and sociality of tourists, digital nomads, and other urban creatives. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of São Paulo and Caxias do Sul (Brazil) and in Lisbon (Portugal), this paper makes innovative connections between migration research, mobility studies and urban theory. We discuss the infrastructural production of transnational and local mobilities and how these businesses both result from and facilitate the existence of mobile lifestyles.
Besides a more general concern over transport infrastructure, its quality and availability, mobility is also a pre-condition for city dwellers to access urban resources, facilities, employment, local services and leisure. Moreover, mobility allows urban inhabitants to uncover a city's potentialities and to fully participate in urban life. Migrants, nevertheless, face the issue of learning to do mobility in a new environment together with the urgency for settlement, finding work, making personal connections and attending to the mundane needs of everyday life that require one to move about. This article looks at migrants' urban mobilities in Lisbon, Portugal, from two perspectives. First, we look at migrants' urban knowledge and skills and at how they employ their abilities to use Lisbon's urban resources. Second, we address some of the ways placespecific urban resources of a religious nature sustain and are sustained by various (im)mobility practices. More specifically, we look to a suburban mosque run by Guinean migrants and to a Sikh Gurdwara. This mobile/place-based contrast points to the variegated (and often overlooked) forms of mobility (or lack of) that are put to practice by migrants and to how they shape the everyday of migration journeys and their capacities to enjoy city-living.
Humanitarian migration relates to the movement of people who feel somehow forced to move. Yet, distinguishing which migration forms fall under the label of humanitarian migration is not straightforward. Migration research has a history of separating between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migration flows, however, this distinction has been challenged since the 1990s. This chapter includes an overview of research in the broad area of ‘humanitarian migration’, and summarises key research trends concerning refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, victims of trafficking and unaccompanied migrant minors.
Family migration is the term used to categorise the international movement of people who migrate due to new or established family ties. People moving for family reasons constitute the largest group of migrants entering OECD countries, ahead of labour and humanitarian migration (OECD, 2017). The study of migrant families cuts across the available legal definitions of family and brings to light emerging forms of living together, gender roles, sexualities, kinship ties, and caregiving practices. This chapter selectively synthesises recent scholarship on family migration, providing insights on the institutionalisation of the field, outlining its approaches and methodologies, and highlighting emerging topics for future research. These include transnational families and how they stay in contact; separated families and deportation; the impact of family migration policies; marriage migration and multi-sited and longitudinal studies used in studying the transformation and diversification of family forms.
A common consequence of sticking to a research topic for a fair amount of time is that it starts colonising your everyday life to a point where you may find yourself asking questions to every new acquaintance as if they were participants in your project. Your friends may become tired of your constant interrogations, but unknown people might simply take you as someone with a peculiar sense of curiosity. I believe this is what recently happened to me when coming back from a conference and decided to call an Uber driver at Lisbon airport. This chapter explores some of the functionalities mental maps offer to migration research. Mental maps (or cognitive maps) have long helped understanding how individuals use and perceive local space. Yet, as a visual method, mental maps may be produced and analysed in distinct ways. This chapter navigates through existing research employing mental maps and argues for an interactive approach to mental map analysis, in which the researcher-participant engagement becomes as fundamental as the actual visualisation produced. Based on fieldwork with migrants in Lisbon, Portugal, the chapter illustrates the methodological potential of mental maps for yielding information about the ways migrants actively mobilise urban resources.
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