Transnational migration, cosmopolitanism and dis-located borders

In recent years, a growing number of scholars in the social sciences are working on migration with a transnational and cosmopolitan perspective as well as on borders. This volume is the outcome of the international seminar called “Transnational Migrations and Dis-Located Borders”, held at the Doctoral School in Anthropology and Epistemology of Complexity of the University of Bergamo in June 2008. The seminar aimed at bringing together some internationally well-known scholars in different research fields and at encouraging discussion on such themes within a cross-disciplinary conversation. Apparently, borders are often regarded as the very basis of an essentialised view of the world like a mosaic of Nation-States. Some authors have talked about ‘methodological nationalism’, which assumes that the nation/state/society is the natural socio-political form of contemporary world. Transnational perspectives seem to challenge this long-standing logic by introducing a new inclination to think in terms of flows, mobility, and networks. Migrants, living in-between sending and receiving societies and maintaining strong ties to both, are shaping transnational spaces encompassing several countries in a process that challenges territorial separations and national borders. This process does not in itself prevent the creation of other borders that recreate divisions along other lines. Borders have not been disappearing but they are moving themselves everywhere. This dis-placement of borders can be conceived as a paradoxical movement from the ‘edge’ to the ‘centre’ of public space. The dialectics between contemporary modes to organize the migration experience on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the transformation of borders can be regarded as a viewpoint to investigate contemporary mobile networks highlighting, at the same time, the variety of their meanings and practices.