Theorising Chance: Capturing the Role of Ad Hoc Social Interactions in Migrants' Trajectories

Gladkova, Nataliia; Mazzucato, Valentina

doi:10.1002/psp.1988

Cited by 27 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(65 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Gladkova and Mazzucato () show that chance events, chance encounters and chance opportunities are often crucial in reaffirming or redirecting destination preferences, even if encounters are ephemeral. Furthermore, such chance events are more likely to happen and can have stronger effects during periods of uncertainty and vulnerability, which defines many current migration journeys (ibid).…”

Section: Where Did People Want To Go?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Deciding Where to go: Policies, People and Perceptions Shaping Destination Preferences

Crawley¹,

Hagen‐Zanker

2018

International Migration

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is considerable interest among European politicians and policymakers in the factors influencing the destination preferences of refugees and other migrants. Drawing on in‐depth qualitative interviews with more than 250 Syrians, Eritreans and Nigerians, this article examines the destination preferences of those crossing the Mediterranean in 2015 and the extent to which they were aware of, and/or influenced by, policies intended to control and manage their arrival. Our findings question the extent to which deterrence policies have their intended or assumed effects. Preferred destinations are rarely identified solely, or even primarily, on the basis of migration policies devised by different governments with the explicit aim of reducing the number of arrivals. Rather they reflect the “coming together” of a wide range of factors, including access to protection and family reunification, the availability/accuracy of information, the overall economic environment and social networks. Moreover perceptions of migration policies may be more significant than their content as the implications are often not known or misunderstood.

show abstract

Section: Where Did People Want To Go?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Deciding Where to go: Policies, People and Perceptions Shaping Destination Preferences

Crawley¹,

Hagen‐Zanker

2018

International Migration

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It has proven to be a fruitful analytical lens to further debunk the simplistic notion that the outcome of migration solely depends on a momentous go/no-go decision in a country of origin. With the focus on the journey, migration scholars have become sensitive to the non-linearity of migration processes (Mainwaring and Brigden 2016), the encounters between migrants and mobility regimes (Schapendonk et al 2018), the importance of serial decision-making (Crawley et al 2018; Van der Velde and van Naerssen 2011) and changing identities (Innes 2016), as well as undertheorised issues such as incoherence (Massa 2018) and chance (Gladkova and Mazzucato 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories

Schapendonk

Bolay

Dahinden

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The 'migration journey' has proven to be a fruitful lens to question the simplistic notion that the outcome of migration solely depends on a momentous go/no-go decision in the countries of origin. At the same time, we argue that the normative/sedentarist principles of migration studies produce the risk to approach the journey as an exceptional phase of mobility, in-between presumed place-based lives. This paper therefore aims to explore the conceptual limits of the migration journey literature. To challenge the notion that the migration journey is fundamentally different from pre-and postmigratory mobilities, we combine two empirical research projects that have followed the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans. The first project focuses on the trajectories of itinerant gold miners within West Africa, the second concentrates on the im/ mobility of West Africans within Europe. By juxtaposing the empirical insights of these seemingly different contexts, we stress the need to embed migratory movements in a continuous field of mobility practices across spaces in Africa and Europe. This results in our plea for a research agenda that does not see 'migrancy' as a pre-given marker of difference, but as a normative artefact of mobility regimes.

show abstract

“…They occur thanks to a rare combination of presence, timing and luck involving people that the young Ghanaians had not planned to visit. The accidental nature of these impromptu meetings is difficult to theorize (Gladkova & Mazzucato, 2017). However, they do occur, and while they do not all have to be positive, we noted many supportive encounters and their beneficial effects on young people.…”

Section: Relational Resilience and Connecting To Motivational Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Educational Resilience Through Transnational Mobility Trajectories: Young People Between Ghana and The Netherlands

Geel

Mazzucato

2020

YOUNG

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Trips by migrant youth to their origin country are seen by institutional actors such as teachers and social workers as disrupting youth’s educational progress, and some European countries have financial and legal consequences when these trips take place during the school year. We follow Ghanaian youth living in The Netherlands on their journeys to Ghana and study how they experience such trips and are affected by them. Trips allow young people to reconnect with family and old friends, recollect memories, and confront them with poverty in their country of origin, making them resilient and motivated when facing adversities in school in the Netherlands. This study investigates how young Ghanaians’ mobility between Ghana and The Netherlands relates to their educational resilience. Based on 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic research following 30 youths of 16–25 age group, we deploy a socio-ecological approach developed in social psychology to identify three resilience-building mechanisms: connection to motivational others, active recollection and comparative confrontation. These mechanisms have to date remained outside of the purview of resilience research and research on migration and education, as these fields focus on the nation-state rather than the transnational context in which young people operate. They thereby ignore mobility patterns that make other contexts relevant to young people’s educational resilience. As such, we expand the socio-ecological model of resilience to include transnational elements and show how mobility can positively relate to education and the resilience of migrant youth.

show abstract

Theorising Chance: Capturing the Role of Ad Hoc Social Interactions in Migrants' Trajectories

Cited by 27 publications

References 39 publications

Deciding Where to go: Policies, People and Perceptions Shaping Destination Preferences

Deciding Where to go: Policies, People and Perceptions Shaping Destination Preferences

The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories

Building Educational Resilience Through Transnational Mobility Trajectories: Young People Between Ghana and The Netherlands

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About