Editors | Smets, K., Leurs, K., Georgiou, M., Witteborn, S. and Gajjala, R. |
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Abstract | The chapter traces the career of the concept of diaspora since its inception and early usage in the 1980s to date and attempts to examine its role as a (re)framing tool in the context of the study of migration. It is argued that the notion of diaspora shifted the ways immigration was conventionally looked at by economists and policy makers at the time of the post-war take off of the European and transatlantic economies. Its impacts, it will be suggested, were manifold: the diasporic turn shifted interest from seeing migrants as temporary (an effect of the guest worker mentality of the post WWII era) to looking at migrant communities as durable social phenomena, made it possible to examine the complex web of interactions among migrants locally and transnationally, allowed social scientists to focus on the social experiences that created and sustained different migrant networks and communities and it challenged the ethnocentrist implicit in earlier migration studies. Finally, the paper points out that in this context, the concept of diaspora opened up avenues for the exploration of the nature of transnationality, connectivity and communication as key domains of diasporic interaction and narrative production in ways that have enhanced our understanding of interconnectedness in an increasingly and rapidly globalizing world. |
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