Call for papers/contributions for Special Issue of Yearbook of Transnational History: Between Macro and Micro History. Scales in Migration Studies.

Guest editor Susanne Lachenicht, Bayreuth, Germany

While the history of migrations has become more important a topic in historical studies from the 1980s onwards, the last two decades in particular have opened up the research field to new patterns and paradigms, to questions beyond methodological nationalism and thus beyond the dichotomy “emigration/immigration.” Migration studies have integrated new notions ‑ that of mobility, of displacement, and of othering – and have therefore enlarged their perspectives on the varieties of human mobility. In transcending methodological nationalism, migration studies specialists have also started linking experiences (and memories) of the mobility of humans across time and space and across disciplines. Historians of antiquity, medieval, and early modern worlds, for instance, now discuss their research with specialists of modernity, including historians as well as political scientists, sociologists, street-workers, artists and NGOs. These shifts in paradigms, in dialogue and conversations cover the lives and situational experiences of mobile people, of people on the move in much better and nuanced ways and help us reflect on past and current migrations.

This thematic issue approaches migrations from the angle of multiscalar studies. Building on Nancy L. Green’s claim for “post-structural structuralism” in migration studies, that is the necessity of “examining and reinterpreting the structures surrounding the migration process in light of individual choice and vice versa” (2005, 72), this issue looks from interdisciplinary, transtemporal and transregional perspectives into early modern and modern migrations at the macro, meso and micro level. How do these different scales inform our understanding of migrations, of individual choice, institutions, discourses or structures? How do structures in migration (processes) come about? How are individuals and situational contexts linked to structures or discourses in migration processes? How do they inform each other?

The volume will bring together four different world migration systems, that of the Black Atlantic, of early modern religious migrations, political exile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and twenty-first century refugee systems, thus encompassing more than six centuries from a global perspective.

The intention is to bring into discussion specialists of different migration phenomena and to reflect on what studying migration processes for different historical periods, regions and from different scales means for our understanding of migration processes from the macro to the micro level. The experts from political sciences, International Relations, economic, social and cultural history bring to the fore different angles of reflection, such as transnational history or life writing. What can these perspectives, apart from specific regional, temporal and disciplinary ones tell us about migrations for specific scales, how can these alter the way we look at migrations?

These are the planned sections, with three contributions each, one from the macro, one from the meso and one from the micro level.

--Early Modern Atlantic Slavery and Labour Systems
--Religion and Empire: Migrations in Early Modern Europa and the Atlantic World
--Political exile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
--World Refugee Systems of the 21st century

The thematic issue will feature twelve contributions (about 7,000 words each), Manuscripts need to be with the guest editor in September 2022.

Please send your one-page proposal by 31 March 2022 to susanne.lachenicht@uni-bayreuth.de.