Localising transnationalism: researching political and cultural events in a context of migration

Abstract

"Migration studies have extensively dealt with networks, transnational spaces and migration fields during the last 15 years. Recently, the focus has gone back to the very local rooting of these transnational spaces: Ludger Pries links geographic and sociological aspects by analysing the 'spatial spanning of the social'; Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse çaglar develop a 'theory of locality in migration studies'. In francophone social geography there is a similar research agenda influenced by Gildas Simon and in migration sociology there are growing interests in researching local-global embedding processes, such as Alain Tarrius' 'La mondialisation par le bas' (globalization from below). Inspired by these approaches, I give two empirical examples for localising transnationalism: By researching political and cultural events in a context of migration, I will show how the understanding of a specific event within an urban context can help us to recognize the rooting of transnational networks. Therefore, my epistemological focus considers festive events as platforms for the negotiation of inclusion/ exclusion and transformation processes within migration. Minorities and majorities are therefore seen as historically-evolved dynamic categories. This choice avoids taking an a priori-defined ethnic, religious or sociocultural category as a key issue in the processes of communitarization. The link of theoretical debates on rituals and events, on translocal social spaces and on globalization leads to innovative methodological instruments in action theory. These allow us to research festive events and their integrative impact in a migratory context. The 1st example will be the Murid parade in New York, where followers of a Sufi group get successfully integrated in the social and urban space in the United States. The 2nd example shows how origin works temporarily as a resource within festive events in Paris, which finally leads to the emergence of a we-group based on a common belonging to an urban territory." (author's abstract)