Marcelo Borges, Dickinson College; Sonia Cancian, Zayed University; Linda Reeder, University of Missouri

Proposals due: 01.11.2015

Love stands at the heart of the stories of migrants, refugees and exiles. The weight of love lost, found, embittered, and celebrated is woven through the stories told by those who cross borders and oceans and those who greet them on the shores. Although often buried under the legal, economic and historical analyses, experts are quick to seize on the affective language of migration as a means of humanizing or dehumanizing migrants within broader political debates. Twenty-first century newspapers, like their nineteenth-century counterparts, are filled with images of women left wailing on the shores, children huddled under their mother’s arms, men leading their families to safety providing visual commentary to the historical and contemporary discussions of the costs and benefits of migration. Yet, there has been little historical analysis of how gender norms enmeshed in the emotional landscapes of migration inform personal and political understandings of migration. In this collection we are seeking work that examines the ways in which the meanings of love gender migration processes, patterns of assimilation, public policy, and law. Read more and source … (Web)