Abstract

Emotions are increasingly recognised as a fundamental dimension of human mobility. Indeed, there has been sustained and increasing scholarly interest in the intersection between migration and emotion over the last two decades. Theoretical and empirical contributions in this area have advanced our understanding of migration experiences in their diversity. Furthermore, viewing migrants’ lived experiences through an emotions lens can reveal a variety of hidden inequalities, unsettle hegemonic discourses and reveal practices of resistance. Perceptions of social categories such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age are shaped by emotions and it is therefore valuable to ‘investigate how certain emotions “stick” to certain bodies or flow and traverse space’. Considering emotions as contextual and intersubjective, rather than personal and individual, draws attention to the emotional construction of political events and the politicisation of everyday life, both of which are relevant to understandings of international migration. Moreover, the contributions included in this issue demonstrate the capacity of emotions to create and shape social landscapes. This constitutes resistance to what Alison Jaggar terms ‘emotional hegemony’, or the instrumentalisation of emotions to serve the interests of dominant groups and discredit subordinate groups. Whilst this special issue may be of particular interest to migration scholars, a broader audience will recognise the political anxieties resulting from a blurring of the borders between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Indeed, emotions are an essential element of the formation, reproduction and destruction of borders and boundaries, communities, nation-states and individual experiences and, consequently, are proof of the fictitious fragmentation of time, space and place.