Glossary

Successful collaboration begins with a shared language, hence the need for a glossary. This joint effort of contributors from several teams ensures, on the one hand, terminological and conceptual coherence across not only our theoretical approaches, but also the qualitative case studies and quantitative research conducted in OPPORTUNITIES. On the other hand, our glossary facilitates communication between the academic side of the project and the fieldwork conducted by NGOs, uniting our teams working from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ghana, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Senegal.

For more information about the Structure and Objectives of the Glossary, click here...)

Fictions of migration

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (2021 [1989/1962]), arguably – in the second half of the twentieth century – the most influential sociological account of the “bourgeois” public sphere, Jürgen Habermas emphasizes the literary character of his liberal model of civil society. The relevance of the writer as a public intellectual in Noam Chomsky’s (2017) sense is particularly obvious in conversations on racism, diversity, and migration. As Roy Sommer (2001) has argued, fictions of migration therefore occupy a special place among stories of migration, exploiting, and relying on what British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak (2020) has recently called “the transformative power of stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom” (88). Fictions of migration can take many forms, including autobiographical novels, coming-of-age stories, the classical bildungsroman, revisionist historical fiction, and transcultural novels which challenge essentialist notions of race, culture, and gender.

⇢ see also:  Figure of the migrant, Migrant, Representation of migration

References and further reading:

Chomsky, Noam. 2017. Who Rules the World? London: Penguin.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2021. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Shafak, Elif. 2020. How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division. London: Profile Books.

Sommer, Roy. 2001. Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

Category: B

Work Package: 2, 5

[RS]

 

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