Class Contention and a World in Motion

The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neo-liberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new cross-disciplinary frameworks, which reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged and theoretically imaginative responses to these important issues of late modernity.

"This book represents a superb edited collection of important and relevant essays on the relationship between class and migration in the contemporary world. As such, the introduction and the articles make a major contribution to the literatures on migration and industrial/service work under contemporary capitalist conditions of labor and neoliberal globalization."---Donald M. Nonini, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"The authors challenge currently dominant approaches to migration, and offer important ways to move between the individual experience and the structure of the world system."---Alan Smart, University of Calgary

Prevailing scholarship on migration tends to present migrants as the objects of history, subjected to abstract global forces or to concrete forms of regulation imposed by state and supra state organizations. In this volume, by contrast, the focus is on migrants as the subjects of history who not only react but also act to engage with and transform their worlds. Using ethnographic examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East, contributors question how and why particular forms of political struggle and collective action may, or indeed may not, be carried forward in the context of geographic and social border crossings. In doing so, they bring the dynamic relationship between class, gender, and culture to the forefront in each distinctive migration setting.