Rebooting Migration Theory: Interdisciplinarity, Globality, and Postdisciplinarity in Migration Studies

It is no small ambition to bring together a comprehensive overview of contemporary migration theory across the social sciences and humanities. Such has been the explosion of interest in international migration in the past decade or so that no scholar nowadays can feel adequate when confronting the avalanche of literature that has followed. The rather heroic enterprise presented here has the virtue of letting disciplinary perspectives speak for themselves in a congenial dialogue, rather than attempting a unified theory, the most prominent of which have typically emerged from a base in economic theory (Massey et al. 1998; Hammar et al. 1997). It is thus highly instructive to read each chapter as a guide to the specific mindset of various disciplines toward the subject. Nonspecialists will learn as much about what political scientists, anthropologists, demographers, economists, or lawyers do from reading the respective chapters, as about political science, anthropological, demographic, economic, or legal approaches to migration theory.