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Mapping Immigrant Imaginations: Comparing North Africans in Montréal and Marseille

Description du projet

Les impacts réels de l’imaginaire sur les processus de mobilité

Exposés à plusieurs environnements, les immigrants sont susceptibles de développer des affiliations et des identifications culturelles multiples. Cependant, les cadres socio-cognitifs qui favorisent ces orientations multipolaires restent un mystère. Le projet Im.magine financé par l’UE, comblera ce manque de connaissances. Plus précisément, il traitera l’expérience de la migration internationale comme un «événement de la vie extrême» qui élargit l’imagination à travers une combinaison de processus matériels et symboliques. Le projet proposera une application empirique des imaginaires réflexifs via des études de cas comparatives de maghrébins vivant à Montréal, au Canada, et à Marseille, en France. Les résultats mettront en lumière l’imagination des immigrants, faisant progresser notre compréhension des affiliations et des identifications complexes à des lieux.

Objectif

Migration scholars are increasingly attentive to human agency in global mobility processes, leading to a growing interest in ‘migratory imaginations’. There is an unfortunate tendency in the discipline, however, to emphasise the perceptual dimension of the imagination at the expense of its action-oriented one. This hinders the imagination's conceptual and empirical potentials, not least where the particularly ‘active’ imaginations of immigrants are concerned. We know, for instance, that migrants are likely to develop multiple place affiliations and cultural identifications by virtue of their exposure to several environments. Yet little is known about the sociocognitive frameworks that foster these multipolar orientations. Im.magine addresses this gap by treating international migration experience as an ‘extreme life event’ that expands the imagination through combined material and symbolic processes. On a theoretical level, Im.magine underscores the crucial elements of relational and reflexive thinking, which are visible in foundational sociological and geographical conceptions of the imagination, yet frequently overlooked in research on migration-related imaginations. It offers an empirical application of reflexive imaginations by means of comparative case studies of North Africans living in Montréal, Canada, and Marseille, France. Through a triangulated use of official and literary discourse as well as first-person oral, visual, sensory, and digital migration narratives, it will help open up the ‘black box’ of immigrant imaginations. Specifically, by casting migrant biographies onto multiscalar and inter-connected spatio-temporal frames, the project will advance our understanding of complex place affiliations and identifications, thus illuminating the very real impacts of the imagination on mobility processes.

Coordinateur

FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 244 385,28
Adresse
RUE SAINT GUILLAUME 27
75341 Paris
France

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Région
Ile-de-France Ile-de-France Paris
Type d’activité
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Liens
Coût total
€ 244 385,28

Partenaires (1)