Moving Matters is a richly nuanced portrait of the serial migrant: a person who has lived in several countries, calling each one at some point "home." The stories told here are both extraordinary and increasingly common. Serial migrants rarely travel freely—they must negotiate a world of territorial borders and legal restrictions—yet as they move from one country to another, they can use border-crossings as moments of self-clarification. They often become masters of settlement as they turn each country into a life chapter.
Susan Ossman follows this diverse and growing population not only to understand how paths of serial movement produce certain ways of life, but also to illuminate an ongoing tension between global fluidity and the power of nation-states. Ultimately, her lyrical reflection on migration and social diversity offers an illustration of how taking mobility as a starting point fundamentally alters our understanding of subjectivity, politics, and social life.
Price: $28.00
Pages: 200
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Publication Date:
09 January 2013
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9780804770293
Format: Paperback
"Susan Ossman's most recently published book entitled Moving Matters: Paths of Serial Migration offers its readers a welcomed change as she presents her analysis in an original manner that makes this book a joy to read. At the same time, by maneuvering skillfully between her ethnographic data and her thought-provoking analysis of it, she succeeds to add new insights concerning the topic she set out to study . . . Besides offering nuanced insights for scholars dealing with topics such as migration, mobility, borders, and home, Ossman's book will also be highly useful for students in the field of anthropology and ethnology. The latter recommendation for readers is grounded in my argument that this book can be seen to provide one of the finest examples for how one may go about analyzing data that have been collected by means of ethnographic field work, and how to present it in the form of a written ethnography."—Laura Hirvi, Nordic Journal of Migration Research
Susan Ossman is author of Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City (1994) and Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Cairo, Paris (2002). She has held academic positions in Morocco, France, the UK, and the US, and she currently teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
