Global Migration trends: map

From the New York times, a map a bit outdated (2007), but showing migration trends worldwide.

Migration trends 2007

stay tuned,
a.m.

Locality and Journeying in Migration

This paper is to be published in Landscape and Traveling East and West, by Bloomsbury Academic.
More writings to come...

http://www.academia.edu/3787821/Locality_and_Journeying_in_Migration

Migration: the academic and the poetic

Much social research has been dedicated to the experience of migration, exploring the social, economic, cultural and historical factors that determine the lives of increasingly more people over the globe. Their experiences differ greatly depending on those factors, some marked by marginalizing social dynamics, or confronted with a life of illegality, while others view it as a personal quest, or are driven by curiosity and desire for a broader experience of the world. The issues that arise as a result of the migrating experience are manifold, for instance: identity, distance, the idea of the home, belonging, ethnicity, policies about immigration of each particular country, discrimination, etc., etc., etc. Much of the research on migration has focused on those migrants that face marginalization in the new culture, attempting then to offer ways to change the status quo in benefit of these migrants. These theories often come from a history of Western values, praising individuality and difference, using these to propose new identities that may "empower" migrants. In my research I have proposed to look beyond the Western values and to find issues that bring both migrants and non-migrants to a possible place of communication, without prescribing identities or formulas with an idealistic social agenda. 

Martin Heidegger switched in his later writings to a more poetic style, one that brings about a different experience of the reading of the text, and that evokes the issues he considered to be shared amongst humans. His contention was that not only there are concerns and questions that we share, but that they can emerge through the poetic experience. In the present blog I explore the experience of migration from two perspectives: 1) my academic research, including the critique of social theories on migration, proposing then a Heideggerian inter-subjective approach to experience, and 2) My personal experience of migration, narrated through reflections and poetic writings, which are to provide a place of encounter for the reader. A place that can be both felt and analyzed critically, without opposing these two perspectives, and that can provide a more intimate, yet critical understanding of migration.
Comments are always welcome.

"I am nostalgic for a country that doesn't yet exist on a map"

Eduardo Galeano

Andrea Martínez Ph.D.