Introduction to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Global Migration: New Mobilities and Artivism

Tthis collective encyclopedic work aims to provide new views, approaches and perspectives that can enrich the ways in which social sciences and humanities contribute to migration research. We have attempted to answer the need to bring together the critical approaches to global mobility that have emerged in migration research and practices, such as the decolonial perspective (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008; Seppälä et al., 2021) and the ‘participatory turn’ in social research (Leavy, 2017). To do so, we strove to engage various voices, experiences and forms of knowledge aimed at provoking social change in a dual manner: epistemologically, and at the level of practices. In particular, we wanted to present those experiences of activism, artivism, solidarity and resistance that have been deployed to challenge social injustices, the violation of civil rights and the right to mobility, and to create new spaces of (self-) representation and citizenship. Although it is impossible to represent an exhaustive universe of these practices and concepts, the Encyclopedia proposes delving into some of them, in most cases directly narrated by those very activists, scholars, artists and journalists who have committed themselves to creating and disseminating forms of resistance and cultural participation in relation to mobility, border crossing, access to human rights and intercultural relations. Therefore, this work is engaged with a specific political goal: that of understanding and challenging structural inequalities that concern human mobility in the global era. In doing so, our hope is that the Encyclopedia will become a transformative device in itself, intended to inspire and support readers to activate their own practices of resistance and social change.