“This volume breaks from the usual. Winters, Drotbohm, and Guevara González have assembled an excellent collection of cutting-edge contributions that cast new light on the meanings of place and place-making. With rich insights, the collection reveals how people on the move transform the “out-of-the-way places” they traverse in their journeys, even if when they stay only temporarily. The book offers much-needed clarity and insight into the multiple dimensions of (im)mobility that is sure to inspire future research. Highly recommended!” • Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, Los Angeles
People who are “on the move,” particularly migrants and the displaced, often inhabit places that are considered temporary, peripheral, and remote. (Un)Settling Place recentralizes these “out-of-the-way” places as key sites in the shaping of people’s mobility and identities. Ranging from the surveillance and care that migrants experience to the re-creation of social ties and the re-claiming of space, this collection volume seeks to show how a critical approach to in-between place-making can challenge the idea of place as fixed, singular, or one-directional, offering new ways of understanding migrant trajectories.
Nanneke Winters is an Assistant Professor in Migration and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, which is affiliated with Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work has been published in a variety of journals including Population, Space and Place, International Migration Review, and the Journal of Latin American Studies. Before joining ISS, she held research positions in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University.
Heike Drotbohm is a Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She was a fellow at the International Research Center "Work and Life Course in Global Perspective" (Re:Work), Berlin, and at the Department of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research (NYC) and was invited guest professor at the state university of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She has contributed work to the volume, An Anthropology of Disappearance (Berghahn Books, 2013), co-edited a theme section of the journal Focaal, and sits on the board for the Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
Yaatsil Guevara González is a Junior Professor of Migration and the Americas at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies, Germany, previously working for the Department of Anthropology and African Studies (Mainz), the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence and the Center for InterAmerican Studies (Bielefeld). She was a fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (Costa Rica). Specializing in refugee studies, displacement, and the anthropology of everyday life, her contributions include Material Culture and (Forced) Migration (UCL, 2022) and Report Global (Fisherman, 2023).
Area:
LC: JV6225 .U57 2025
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC007000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Emigration & Immigration; SOC008000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Ethnic Studies/General
available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from Berghahn Open Migration and Development Studies initiative.
