BETWEEN TERRITORIES AND MEMORIES: DISRUPTIVE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY METHODOLOGIES FOR RESEARCHING MIGRATIONS IN THE AMERICAS
Human mobilities constitute a structuring dimension of societies in the Americas. From forced displacements caused by wars, dictatorships, internal conflicts and political persecution to contemporary migrations associated with social inequalities, environmental transformations and humanitarian crises, experiences of mobility have helped shape territories, identities, memories and forms of belonging throughout the continent. However, these experiences tend to be represented through rigid categories and homogeneous narratives that reduce the complexity of migrants’ trajectories, whether refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, internally displaced persons, or bearers of the many other labels that evoke multiple meanings and belongings.
This symposium proposes an interdisciplinary dialogue on the methodologies and research strategies used to study human mobilities in the Americas from the postwar period to the present. In keeping with the event’s theme, the aim is to reflect on the relationships between territories, memories and methodological innovation, exploring how experiences of mobility produce, transform and reshape material and immaterial landscapes, as well as the ways in which these experiences are remembered, narrated, archived and transmitted across generations.
The symposium starts from the premise that human mobilities constitute not only movements between defined geographic points, but also social, political, cultural and affective processes that configure complex spatialities and multiple forms and layers of territoriality. From this perspective, territory is not conceived as a fixed or bounded space, but as a dynamic construction traversed by memories, mobility practices, experiences of rootedness and uprootedness, agencies, borders, networks and senses of belonging.
Proposals that develop methodologies capable of recovering the perspectives, memories and forms of agency of migrant populations are welcome, such as critical cartographies, oral history, ethnographic research, participatory methodologies, visual studies, geospatial analysis, archival analysis and other methods that offer innovative tools for making visible experiences frequently absent from official accounts and institutional representations of human mobility. These approaches make it possible to explore the links between memories, spaces and migrations, as well as to understand their material, symbolic, emotional, political and cultural dimensions.
By bringing together researchers from different disciplines, generations and regions of the Americas, the symposium seeks to promote methodological and theoretical exchanges that contribute to a more complex understanding of human mobilities, their memories and their territorialities. It also aims to reflect on how current methodological and technological innovations engage with migrant memories, landscapes and agencies to enrich the study of human (im)mobilities and their multiple meanings in the contemporary Americas.
