Migration: A Critical Introduction

Presents a critical and geographical exploration of migration through storytelling, power, and spatial practices

Migration: A Critical Introduction equips students with the tools to examine migration through a geographical lens that foregrounds stories, power, and place. It offers an essential foundation for critically understanding migration’s diverse forms--labour, family, forced, student, and environmental--within and beyond national borders. This timely volume challenges dominant migration narratives by exploring how policies, legal regimes, and socio-political contexts shape both the categorisation of migrants and the conditions of movement. Three leading scholars of human geography address why and how stories of migration are told, by whom, and to what ends, offering a compelling method for analysing contemporary mobility.

Migration: A Critical Introduction provides a distinctively spatial and critical approach to migration. Its central focus on storytelling allows students to interrogate how migration knowledge is produced, how it connects to power, and how it unfolds across time and space. Practical tools for research, reflective exercises, and further reading lists enhance student engagement, whilst the emphasis on counter-stories encourages the development of more just and imaginative migration futures.

A much-needed guide to thinking differently about one of the most urgent issues of our time, Migration: A Critical Introduction:

• Engages students through a unique storytelling approach that encourages critical reflection and participatory learning
• Offers conceptual clarity by unpacking key migration terms and their policy implications
• Integrates geographical concepts such as space, scale, mobility, and belonging throughout the text
• Draws on a range of interdisciplinary critical theories, including feminist, postcolonial, and critical race studies
• Features case studies and examples from diverse global contexts, including Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas

Supporting emancipatory and justice-oriented approaches to migration futures, Migration: A Critical Introduction is ideal for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students studying migration in courses such as Human Geography, Migration Studies, Political Geography, and Global Studies. It is particularly well-suited to degree programmes in Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and International Relations.

Mary Gilmartin is Professor of Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland. She specialises in migration and mobility, with a particular focus on Ireland. Her books include Ireland and Migration in the Twenty-First Century and Borders, Mobility and Belonging in the Era of Trump and Brexit. Her work is widely published in leading journals across migration and geography.

Malene H. Jacobsen is NUAcT Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University, UK. Her research focuses on displacement, war, and the lived experiences of forced migration across the Middle East and Europe. She is the recipient of the 2022 Political Geography Early Career Research Award and has published in journals such as Political Geography and Progress in Human Geography.

Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto is Docent of Political Geography at the University of Helsinki and University Lecturer in Regional Studies at Tampere University, Finland. Her research explores forced displacement, identity, and embodied memory using visual and ethnographic methods. She has published in Social and Cultural Geography, Oral History Journal, and Journal of Intercultural Studies.