Book Chapter: Cultural Geographies of Migration and Difference

Rachel Silvey, University of Toronto

As places and “cultures” have grown increasingly deeply interconnected across space and as growing abso- lute numbers of migrants have traveled to rising numbers of places in increasingly complex patterns, the migrant has emerged as a key figure embodying, enacting, and representing the fears and hopes attached to globalization. The cultural politics of migration, thus, have required attention not only to the spatial demographies of migration but also to the social processes of meaning-making in relation to citizenship, borders, identities, and labor markets, as well as discourses and histories of racialization and gender relations. Through attention to migrants’ lived geographies, recent research brings to life the political dimensions of migrants’ cultural geographies. In this chapter, I argue that cultural geography, and in par- ticular feminist cultural geography, offers conceptual tools that have been especially illuminating for the rapidly changing lived politics of migration.