The Era of Emergency Relocation: A Transcontextual Perspective

Abstract

As increasing numbers of people are displaced from their homes by war, poverty, and ecological necessity, immigration and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ have become a heated political topic. The rhetoric has become dualistic and is fueling a polarity of discussion that is locking individuals and communities into stances of either “for” or “against,” pro or anti, incoming refugees. The discourse is consequently dividing communities around the world into ideological groupings of nationalistic or globalized visions of the future. This article seeks to go beyond the binary and expand the conversation by bringing a more complex picture of the issue into view. Introducing the notion of transcontextual description to the immigration and refugee discourse is an attempt to hold back the tendencies of us/them reductionism and reframe the conversation of what the possibilities are for responding. Using a transcontextual approach, this article zooms in on institutional contexts as they relate to immigration, and then zooms out to look at the larger interception of these contexts in a new light. The institutions that form societal and global structures are forming interdependency that is similar to an ecology. These institutions include economics, culture, politics, history, family and more. The implications of this process are not described in concrete instructions on how to solve the refugee crisis, but rather to offer a pattern through which to generate conversation that will lead to an entirely new set of questions. Collaborative inter-institutional research at the community level is suggested to generate possibilities as they are found within the natural complexity of the situation.

Notes

1 The term was coined by Gregory Bateson in 1969; see Bateson, 1972/2000, p. 272.

2 The term was coined by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues at MRI in 1956; see Bateson, 1972/2000, p. 201.