The Boundaries of Interdisciplinary Fields: Temporalities Shaping the Past and Future of Dialogue between Migration and Mobilities Research

Abstract

This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of migration and mobilities research by temporalizing understandings of their boundaries – places where differences have been entrenched and some concepts have remained beyond negotiation or dialogue. While the creativity and boundary-crossing potential of interdisciplinary fields is often set in opposition to disciplines, which define and regulate appropriate concepts and knowledge, such characterizations obscure how interdisciplinary fields have boundaries that change over and in relation to time. This paper therefore uses three temporal dynamics – a/synchronicity, sequencing and accumulation over time – to consider the evolving boundaries that have limited collaboration between these fields. By tracing past discussions of concepts such as ‘transnationalism’, ‘mobility’ and ‘methodological nationalism’, it highlights the contingency and complexity of dialogue between these fields, and how they, like disciplines, ‘define what it is permissible not to know’. The new concept of ‘migrant exceptionalism’ is introduced to acknowledge the boundaries created through privileging ‘migrants’ as unique and continuously relevant subjects. Both migration and mobilities scholars are seen to perpetuate migrant exceptionalism, and countering it through the study of sometimes-migrants is identified as a means of modulating existing boundaries and opening new spaces for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Key Words:

• Mobilities
• Migration
• Migrant exceptionalism
• Temporalities
• Interdisciplinary
• Methodological nationalism
• Transnationalism
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank James Faulconbridge, Jen Southern, Kathy Burrell and the reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. An early draft was presented at the Global Mobility Futures conference at Lancaster University, 6 September 2013.

Notes

1. Many thanks to Kathy Burrell for bringing this point to my attention.

2. While these figures include the children of Hong Kong residents with short-term work visas, a substantial proportion of the growth is from visitors with temporary tourist visas.

3. Children over the age of 11 can apply for this card, which has a chip including biometric information and allows access to public services as well as fast-track passage through immigration checkpoints.