Aug 2026· Irish Journal of Sociology· 0 citations· 15 references
Abstract
This article examines the interconnections between mobility, morality and place in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, highlighting how mobility is shaped by, and in turn reshapes, ‘moral geographies’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nail, a small Himalayan village, the article argues that the politics of mobility in Uttarakhand is, in fact, a politics of place. It highlights how mobilities challenge the normative spatial order, shaping perceptions of who is in place/out of place and insider/outsider, thereby causing distress and anxiety among residents about the future of their place. As a result, certain mobile actors are perceived as transgressive. By situating the politics of mobility within broader historical contexts, regional disparities and global climate and environmental changes, the article suggests that there is no single or universal way of organising place, mobility or belonging. It is among the first studies to use a moral geography lens to understand the complex relationships between place, mobility and belonging in the context of Uttarakhand.
There is a longstanding and global history of fierce opposition to
internal
migration across regions. Yet despite the salience of this issue, there is a relative dearth of scholarship on the politics around domestic population movements. This paper critically engages three interrelated concepts in conversation: nativism, sons of the soil and autochthony. This comparative conceptual analysis considers how varied expressions of hostility towards internal migrants can manifest across diverse geographical and sociopolitical contexts in the Global North and Global South. The analysis highlights the need to bridge parallel literatures and empirical worlds as this reveals the diverse ways in which internal migration dynamics can fuel contentious politics of belonging. Though conceptually distinct, we argue these concepts similarly describe how exclusionary language targets internal migrants by emphasizing a hierarchy of belonging based on place‐based identities when ‘natives’ fear future marginalization vis‐à‐vis migrant ‘outsiders’.
Isabelle Côté, Matthew I. Mitchell, Catherine Xhardez· Nations and Nationalism· 0 citations
This research presents a comparative sociopolitical analysis of the works of Fatima Bhutto and Mohsin Hamid, exploring how their narratives reflect the fragmented realities of identity, resistance, and globalization in contemporary society. Rooted in the sociopolitical contexts of Pakistan while extending to global concerns, both authors delve into the intersections of personal and collective struggles under the pressures of political upheaval, economic disparity, and cultural dislocation. Bhutto’s The Shadow of the Crescent Moon highlights the experiences of marginalized voices in conflict-ridden regions, intertwining personal loss with systemic oppression. In contrast, Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West critically engage with themes of migration, alienation, and the dissolution of both physical and psychological borders highlighting the intimate effects of globalization and post-9/11 politics. This study examines their shared focus on the tensions between belonging and displacement, resilience and submission, and the local and global. Through close textual analysis and the application of postcolonial and globalization theories, this research reveals how Bhutto and Hamid not only critique sociopolitical systems but also demonstrate literature’s potential to resist and reimagine power dynamics in an interconnected yet unequal world, underscoring the sociopolitical themes at the heart of this comparative study.
Mohammad Baset Dorrazahi, Farahnaz Yosefi, Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati· Journal of Historical Resear...· 0 citations
Sub-Saharan migration to Morocco has, in recent years, become a central issue in public debate, largely shaped by media discourse. Within a context marked by the implementation of Morocco's new migration policy, the media play a decisive role in constructing social representations of migrants, influencing perceptions, attitudes, and processes of legitimation or delegitimation of their presence within the social space. This article examines how the Moroccan press addresses Sub-Saharan migration and discursively frames migrants' trajectories, living conditions, and figures of migratory otherness.
Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines social representation theory, media constructions of otherness, and critical discourse analysis, the study is based on a qualitative analysis of a corpus of articles from the Moroccan print and digital press, published after the adoption of the new migration policy. The analysis brings to light ambivalent discursive logics, oscillating between narratives of vulnerability and victimization, security-oriented registers, and attempts at humanization and symbolic integration of Sub-Saharan migrants.
The findings show that while some media outlets contribute to deconstructing stereotypes and promoting an inclusive representation of migration, others participate in reproducing stigmatizing discourses, sometimes fuelled by forms of simplification, dramatization, or misinformation. This contribution thus interrogates the role of Moroccan media in shaping the social imaginaries linked to migration and in the contemporary dynamics of otherness.
E. Naila, Razkaoui Yassin· Journal of Social Science an...· 0 citations
Introduction:
This article examines the affective governmentality of migration at the interior frontiers of Arica, a Latin American border city in northern Chile. Drawing on the intersection of critical migration, border studies, and affect theory, it argues that affects of control do not merely accompany the urban segregation of irregularized migrants but actively constitute the interior frontiers that produce it.
Method:
The analysis is based on a pragmatist ethnography carried out between September 2024 and December 2025 in Cerro Chuño, an informal land occupation (
toma
) inhabited primarily by undocumented Venezuelan families, and combines participant observation, ten in-depth ethnographic interviews, and a complementary, ethnographically integrated discourse analysis of 494 online comments on two evictions reported by local digital news media.
Results:
Conceptually, the article articulates two strands of critical migration and border scholarship: the politics of exhaustion, which theorizes everyday violence as a biopolitics that wears down bodies and the infrastructures of life without killing directly; and the literature on affective control, which examines how migration regimes govern through disciplinary emotions such as fear, frustration, and uncertainty. Empirically, the analysis is organized into two affective situations. From within the interior frontier, everyday life in the
toma
is marked by chronic fatigue and the fear of a triple dispossession—deportation, eviction, and state-led separation of children—while evictions accelerate this slow violence, turning fatigue into exhaustion and fear into despair, met by practices of endurance sustained through faith, humor, and persistence. From the “exterior” of the interior frontier, online hate speech mobilizes hatred, disgust, and fear to present Venezuelan migrants as a contaminating and threatening other.
Discussion:
The article offers a situated ethnographic elaboration of the interior frontier as an affective zone, advances migration studies by specifying how border regimes are enacted through bodies, emotions, and urban space, and expands Latin American debates on migration governance by foregrounding the affective dimensions of control and resistance.
P. Díaz, Andrés Gallardo· Frontiers in Human Dynamics· 0 citations
This conceptual paper seeks to outline how hospitality discourses have been used to rationalize and justify policies of ethnic cleansing and displacement within the occupied and besieged Palestinian Territories, focusing particularly on the comments and social media activity of the president of the United States Donald Trump. Drawing on a post-qualitative inquiry approach, this paper
thinks with
Foucault by using his concepts as ‘plugs’, to generate new insights into how hospitality discourse, as a form of social control, enacts symbolic violence through the language of care and compassion. The paper establishes links with ongoing scholarship that implicates tourism development and planning within territorial disputes, land grabs and the displacement of Indigenous people, by describing how hospitality can be weaponized as a discourse of development that evokes a sense of respectability alongside the illusion of a politically neutral process. Hospitality articulated in this way enables violent realities to be hidden underneath the language of welcome.
M. Palkowski· Hospitality & Society· 0 citations
This research corresponds to a participatory action research exercise that aims to accompany the construction of meaning among rural youth, in the department of Boyacá, Colombia, to identify opportunities for productive projects in their territory. The research is approached from an interpretative approach that emphasizes the subjective constructions of social actors, considering that the phenomenon is not observed with universal laws that prescribe causes and effects, but that multiple rationalities are conceived around the concepts of rural entrepreneurship, migration from the countryside to the city, vision of the future, among others. The methodological approach is qualitative of a phenomenological nature, to seek to reveal the schemes of meaning of young people around their plans for the immediate future. The results indicate the existence of a discourse based on the idea that it is necessary to migrate to find opportunities for personal growth and improvement of living conditions. The discourse shared by the young people is accompanied by the lack of interest of community leaders and local governments in incorporating this population in the exercises of thinking about the territory.
M. Pineda, Lina María Otálora Gómez, J. Camargo· Journal of Intelligent Decis...· 0 citations