Glossary

According to the legal definition provided in the European Migration Network (EMN) Glossary, a migrant is a person who establishes their residence “outside the territory of the State of which they are nationals or citizens and who has resided in a foreign country for more than one year irrespective of the causes, voluntary or involuntary, and the means, regular or irregular, used to migrate.” As such, the legal term migrant may thus refer to various types of individuals who exert various forms of mobility such as family reunification, economic migration, studying abroad, etc. (Goubin et al. 2022, 9).

Legal definitions leave no room for personal experience or individual attitudes, beliefs, and values. For this reason, they often stand in stark contrast to humanitarian explications. Amnesty International, for instance, explicitly refrains from giving a clear-cut definition of the term migrant, to account for the fact that it covers a very heterogeneous group of people, all of whom may have left their home country for different reasons. This variety is reflected in research in the humanities, where broad concepts like “figures of mobility” (Salazar 2017) include the homeless and stateless, as well as nomads, vagrants, immigrants, emigrants, refugees, and undocumented people (Nail 2015, 11).

⇢ see also Asylum; Asylum seeker, Expatriate, Migration, Migration and identity, Mobility, Refugee, Rural-urban migrant

References and further reading:

Amnesty International. 2021. “Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants.” Amnesty International. URL: https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/refugees-asylum-seekers-and-migrants/.

European Commission. 2020. European Migration Network (EMN) Glossary. URL: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/european-migration-network-emn/emn-asylum-and-migration-glossary_en.

Goubin, Silke, Anna Ruelens, and Ides Nicaise. 2022. “Trends in Attitudes towards Migration in Europe: A Comparative Analysis.” KU Leuven, HIVA – Research Institute for Work and Society. [Working paper of the OPPORTUNITIES project 101004945 – H2020].

Nail, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Salazar, Noel B. 2017. “Key Figures of Mobility: An Introduction.” Social Anthropology 25.1: 5–12.

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For a legal definition of the term “migration,” see the respective entry in the European Migration Network (EMN) Glossary provided by the European Commission. The OPPORTUNITIES project approaches migration from a cross-cultural perspective that seeks to establish a dialogue between African and European takes on migration, acknowledging the wide variety of reasons and motivations behind it, and highlighting the fact that both African and European cultures view mobility, on principle, in a positive light, encouraging labor migration and mobility in the labor market, education, science, and other sectors.

The rhetoric of crisis dominating current policy narratives in the EU, however, focuses on the perceived negative effects of “irregular” migration (see “Irregular migration”). OPPORTUNITIES holds that a different approach to migration is both possible and desirable; Uganda is one example of a country which has adopted positive migration policies (see Dryden-Petersen and Hovel 2004, United Nations Development Programme 2018).

⇢ see also Asylum; Asylum seeker, Crisis, Demographics of migration, Expatriate, Integration, Labor migration, Migrant, Migration and identity, Mobility, Refugee

References and further reading:

Dryden-Petersen, Sarah, and Lucy Hovel. 2004. “A Remaining Hope for Durable Solutions: Local Integration of Refugees and Their Hosts in the Case of Uganda.” Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 22.1: 26–38.

European Commission. 2020. European Migration Network (EMN) Glossary. URL: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/european-migration-network-emn/emn-asylum-and-migration-glossary_en.

United Nations Development Programme. 2018. Uganda’s Contribution to Refugee Protection and Management. URL: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/64687.

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Generally, multiperspectivity means looking at an issue such as migration and integration from various angles, for example by approaching it with different methods or by encouraging an open and fair dialogue between migrants, citizens, politicians, and other stakeholders in Cross Talk events. In stories, multiperspectivity means that several viewpoints are presented to offer the audience a more diverse or nuanced picture.

Level Telling Fields promote multiperspectivity in public conversations, such as migration discourses. Two forms can be distinguished: Horizontal multiperspectivity occurs when an issue is represented from different angles, allowing for debate – e.g., in policy narratives, scientific research, or media reports – or when a wide range of migrant experiences (countries of origin, age, gender, status) are represented in migration discourses. Vertical multiperspectivity occurs when different kinds of perspective (e.g., life stories and official narratives) are represented together. While horizontal multiperspectivity is the norm in democratic, open societies, vertical multiperspectivity is often difficult to achieve. The Level Telling Field promotes both types of multiperspectivity to create conditions for a fair dialogue on migration and integration.

⇢ see Cross Talk, Level Telling Field, Polyphony, Scale

References and further reading:

Hartner, Marcus. 2014. “Multiperspectivity.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. URL: https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/37/revisions/342/view.html.

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