Panel: On the Move: Exploring Choices Along Migration Trajectories

Abstract

A migrant’s trajectory, as understood in contemporary frameworks, is a continuous process composed of discrete stages where individuals regularly make decisions whether to stay or to go. These decisions are context dependent, adapting to one’s immediate economic and political environment as well as evolving priorities. Conflict, natural disasters, or polycrises, alter the context in which these decisions are made by generating displacement that is forced or sudden thereby prompting individuals to move without a long-term plan. Migration in this context is increasingly fragmented with trajectories that contain a mixture of mobility and stasis. Recent contributions to migration studies have more and more engaged with such complex migration trajectories, highlighting the ‘open-ended’ nature of such movements and influential socio-demographic factors. Missing from current understanding, however, is a longitudinal perspective. That is, to what extent and in what contexts the trajectory itself affects subsequent (im)mobility decisions and how a migrant’s priorities may evolve throughout the migration process.

The aim of this panel is to investigate the decision making process of migrants at intermediate or traistory stages within their larger journey. By centering questions of mobility and stasis on the trajectory itself the goal is to uncover how diverse processes and transitional experiences affect outcomes. This panel welcomes both research with quantitative and qualitative methodologies and encourages interpretation of the trajectory both as an inflection point for decision-making and as an object worthy of exploration in itself.

in-person event