The Places We Share - (Program in Migration and Refugee Studies) by Susan Ossman (Paperback)

About the Book

This book explores the relationship of mobility to subjectivity, identity to place by exploring the lives of people on the move. The authors draw on research among nomads, immigrants and serial migrants and question their own trajectories. Their comments on cosmopolitanism, ethnicity and religion challenge conventional wisdom from concrete but 'ungrounded' perspectives.

Book Synopsis

While some people study globalization, others live their lives as global experiments. This book brings together people who do both. The authors or subjects of these studies are of diverse national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. What they have in common is a connection to Morocco. It is from this shared space that they draw on personal stories, fieldwork, and literary and linguistic analysis to provide a critical, socially reflexive response to the conceptions of culture, identity, and mobility that animate debates on migration and cosmopolitanism. On the trail of the Bedouin or Europe's new nomads and of Zaccarias Moussaoui Places We Share explores the relationship of mobility to subjectivity, and how physically moving can be a way of escaping the stigma of being an immigrant. Reading Rushdie, listening to Moroccan women converse in the UAE, or examining how the experience of serial migration can shape comparative ethnography we become more aware of how moving pushes us up against the limits of global experience. These limits must be recognized. They can be positively embraced to develop new ways of conceiving of ourselves, the world and our connections to others.

Review Quotes

"This volume, edited by Susan Ossman, deals with issues of great importance and relevance for our era. In an era where there is a widespread preoccupation with the quantitative categorisation of migrants' personal or collective characteristics, this book offers a quite different perspective which gives emphasis to subjectivity, identity fluidity, representations of mobility and space, and culture. Overall, this book is a valuable resource offering an alternative perspective on migration. It makes for a wonderful read!" --Theodoro Iosifides, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

"Because of the thematic...emphasis on Morocco, this collection will be of particular interest to social scientists working in the region, but it also makes a strong contribution to anthropology, the literature on migration, and critical media studies. Scholars of religion will find useful the essays demonstrating the complex facets of religious and cultural identity. The nuanced way many of the authors critique the notion of cosmopolitanism through lived experience is refreshing, and the diverse perspectives highlight the complex social positions of serial migrants in a world where movement among multiple cultures does not imply rootlessness but rather complex attachments to space and place." --MESA Bulletin

About the Author

Susan Ossman is senior lecturer at Goldsmith's College, University of London.