Theme: Moving Stories: Migrations, Movements, and Meanings

For many of us, migration and mobility have become a central part of our lives.  More generally, some form of movement runs through the communities in which we live and the societies in which we have a sense of belonging. With immigration discourses and anti-immigrant sentiments permeating our political world these days, the power of stories and of storytelling to contribute to, or to push back against, these forces has been increasingly important.

We use narratives to tell others (and ourselves) who we are and who we are not, where we belong and where we don’t. We also use narratives to declare who is “other” and with such othering signal, sometimes violently, who is worthy and who is not. Within these narratives, notions of “place”, “border”, “home”, “integration”, “community”, and “nation”, as well as “belonging” and “identity”, can take new shapes and forms. They are highly fluid concepts, and their fluidity is captured through the stories that we tell, not just in our everyday lives but in our social, legal, and political discourses as well.

Alongside such stories of migration and movement are stories that move us, that speak to us with their meaning and emotional power, that disrupt us from our usual sense of things, and that perhaps incite to think, feel, and act otherwise. Migrations, movements, and meanings thus form a family of ideas that carries special urgency in the contemporary world, especially in those places riven by persecution, dislocation, and loss. There are many.

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