SEMINAR: Anthropology Seminar Series

Australian migration processes are rapidly transforming in the face of late capitalism. Most prominently, the settler migrant paradigm of the 20th century is being replaced with a multiplication in modes of entry and migrant statuses, and increased transience, circularity and transnationality. Hierarchies of migrant desirability are increasingly quantified and increasingly complex, and both state and capitalist processes are intertwined across the infrastructures that both enable and constrain migration, in terms of mobility across borders, status mobility, settlement and transnational practices. This paper seeks to explore some of the new lenses and tools that Australian migration scholarship may require to move forward in this current context of more dynamic and more fragmented migration policies and changing lived experiences of migration. The paper centres on three conceptual foci that re-imagine or re-focus migration research the multi dimensionalities of status; the temporalities of mobility; and infrastructural complexes and encounters. It also suggests some expansions to the sites and subjects of migration research. Drawing on local and international literature that reflects some of these research directions, as well as vignettes from ongoing empirical work on the staggered pathways of contemporary migration to Australia, the paper suggests analytical frameworks and entry points, as well as possible methodological interventions based on these three conceptual lenses.