Migration, Discourse, and Water-Place

Discussions of migration are often dominated by negative discourses, focusing on issues such as security, threats, and governance, while ignoring the function of migration in renewing and creating local cultures, knowledges, and place itself. This article uses securitisation theory to analyse the causes and operation strategies of these negative discourses. The article first discusses the role of migration research in the journal Folk, Knowledge, Place, then explores the securitisation of migration and the collusion between discourse and politics of migration. It advocates a bottom-up perspective, rooted in ethnography, to study the politics of scale in migration. Finally, the paper uses migration to expand the concept of place beyond terrestriality and toward an understanding of water-place.