Migrant Knowledge

Migrant Knowledge

Category: Articles

"Migration" is not a stable, preexisting category but rather a product of societal processes that shape what the term comprises. We must take these entanglements with the past into account in our present-day research.

Not a Given Object: What Historians Can Learn from the Reflexive Turn in Migration Studies

Isabella Löhr
Christiane Reinecke

A Berlin-based group works with refugee girls, who make films as a way to narrate their life experiences. The idea is to help the girls form and mobilize knowledge repertoires for their self-empowerment, although the process is by no means linear.

Girls’ Self-Empowerment through Narrative in Film

Mervete Bobaj
Anh-Susann Pham Thi

A researcher from Scotland, by way of Germany, examines a key text offered to international scholars at UC Berkeley during their initial orientation session there.

Exclusion and Erasure in ‘The Values Majority Culture Americans Live By’

A book for children about young refugees in New York was rooted in real experiences. Its author's eye for children's agency can help us to understand refugee children as go-betweens in wartime New York.

Young Refugees and Knowledge in New York during World War II: The Example of Babette Deutsch’s ‘The Welcome’

The "Qur'an school problem" in West Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s was in many ways a product of the migrant experts who bemoaned it, the teachers on loan from Turkey.

Turkish Teachers, Migrant Knowledge, and ‘the Qurʾan School Problem’ in West Germany

Protestant missionary schools affected the construction of "indigenous knowledge" in complex ways, including through their role in the emergence of local go-betweens, who carried this knowledge into colonial contexts.

The Formation of Indigenous Knowledge in Protestant Mission Schools, 1900–1930

Elisabeth Engel

Glenn Penny highlights aspects of children's go-between role in Chile not visible in histories of European migration to the United States. German schools in Chile and teachers posted there from Germany are central to this multigenerational story.

Routes of Knowledge: Growing up German in Chile, 1900–50

The role of children in history matters, including in knowledge formation and in migration. Simone Lässig introduces a miniseries about children and youth as go-betweens in migration contexts, whether people migrated or knowledge itself.

Knowledge and the Agency of Children in Migration Contexts

How to name people who move their lives across borders willingly or under duress? Eliyana Adler discusses the diverse terms contemporaries used to identify the various groups of Polish Jews who survived World War II as refugees in the Soviet Union.

What’s in a Name? How Titles Construct and Convey Knowledge about Migrants

Eliyana R. Adler

Many European émigrés escaping the Nazis helped shape consumer capitalism in the United States. After the war, they did business in Europe as well, circulating their transformed knowledge to shape marketing there.

European Émigrés and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge: Examples from Mid-20th-Century Consumer Capitalism

Germans translated Buddhist texts in Germany, and they migrated to British Ceylon in order to get closer to Buddhism. Their Buddhist practices ended up changing Buddhism's relationship to texts in their South Asian home.

German Migrants and the Circulation of Buddhist Knowledge between Germany and British Ceylon

Sebastian Musch

Through playtime, Jewish refugee children in Shanghai acquired specific knowledge about their new home through sources unavailable to adults refugees.

The Power of Play: Jewish Refugee Children in World War II Shanghai

As Chinese children and youth immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they had to overcome increasing restrictions on their entry. Wendy Rouse describes the knowledge they formed and passed on to succeed.

Crossing Borders: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge

Julie Weise asks how migrants responded to state-driven mandates to control and shape labor migration in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

In Sickness and in Health: Migrant Citizenships in the Postwar Years

Andrea Wiegeshoff explorers the interactions of different ways of knowing at the moment of immigration using the 1914 example of Wong Kum Wo in Honolulu.

Clashing Ways of Knowing at the Moment of Immigration

Andrea Wiegeshoff

The work of both Hans Rosenberg and Raul Hilberg was initially marginalized, but later entered the mainstream of German historiography. Why? What role did migration play in their work and its reception?

Marginalized Migrant Knowledge: The Reception of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in West Germany after 1945

Hirschfeld's encounters with Islam and Muslims in Indonesia, India, and the Near East "taught him how closely connected the issues of sexual and cultural diversity were."

Knowledge in Transit: Global Encounters and Transformation in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Travelogue

Makes a case for not prejudging people smugglers in history or the testimony they left behind in state police records, using the example of Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar period.

Background Knowledge: Interrogating Perceptions of Smugglers with Joseph Roth

Allison Schmidt

Revisits Werner Schiffauer's 1991 classic, Die Migranten aus Subay, which reminds us that "migrants have lives of their own before they arrive in host societies, and they never cease to maintain ties … to the homelands they leave behind."

Rebels against the Homeland: Turkish Guest Workers in 1980s West German Anthropology

Michelle Lynn Kahn

Surveys the research on current efforts to leverage professional knowledge and skills among migrant populations for development in their countries of origin. Pays particular attention to a program called Connecting Diaspora for Development.

Research on Diaspora Knowledge Transfer within a Temporary Return Program

Charlotte Mueller

Thinks about how migrant biographies and autobiographies can be used to understand associated knowledge transfer and translation processes, including their "success" or "failure." Examples are from Australia after World War Two.

Migrant Biographies as a Prism for Explaining Transnational Knowledge Transfers

Explores two points in U.S. past when Jewish history and migration studies intersected: 19th-century studies of Jewish migration by local community organizations; and role played by Jewish social scientists in shaping modern migration studies.

Acquiring Knowledge About Migration: The Jewish Origins of Migration Studies

Tobias Brinkmann

"Migrant knowledge figures as a category of absence" in Europe. In Germany, one core issue is knowledge about recycling requirements and expectations. Efforts to teach it "betray an unreflective understanding of cultural identity."

Refuge and Refuse: Migrant Knowledge and Environmental Education in Germany

The author reflects on the migrant knowledge revealed in Alex Pitstra's film about his complicated transnational family relationships, "Bezness as Usual."

The Trade-Off Called Love? Knowledge about Love, Migration, and Borders

Miriam Gutekunst

"Reconstituting the networks of the complex and mobile individuals through which indenture globally spread as a legal form of labor can sharpen our understanding of how migration practices and policies became universalized over the course of the nineteenth century..."

Of Dodos, Cane, and Migrants: Networking Migrant Knowledge between Mauritius and Hawai’i in the 1860s

Nicholas B. Miller

A young German in 19th-century North America bragged that his travels had enabled him to "learn and see how it goes in the world." What did he mean? What can we learn from him about migration, knowledge, and knowledge formation?

Migration, Creativity, and the Construction of Knowledge

The author expected to find files in Paris for his study of Franco-Yiddishness in the interwar period, but they had wandered elsewhere. His surprise led him to consider "the migratory history of knowledge and knowledge-making."

Following the Archives: Migrating Documents and their Changing Meanings

Discusses a 1909 Syrian American advice book for Ottoman subjects planning to emigrate to the U.S., which contained knowledge about would-be immigrants' specific rights in the U.S. and self-fashioning tips for dealing with authorities there.

A Little Advice: Syrian American Advice Booklets as Knowledge Production

Stacy D. Fahrenthold

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen examines the personal geographies of some Mennonites in Latin America who "have exercised a paradoxical degree of mobility" despite their well-known horse-and-buggy appearance.

Marginal Knowledge: The Transnational Practices of Latin American Mennonites

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen

The author argues that history must be reconceptualized to include migrants not as extras in a society's history but as constitutive of that society. Her example comes from contemporary Swiss history.

Telling History from a Migration Perspective is Not an Add-On

Points to manifold manifestations of migrant knowledge and reflects on how studying it can open fruitful avenues of historical research.

Migrant Knowledge: An Entangled Object of Research

Andrea Westermann

This piece was published on Migrant Knowledge (migrantknowledge.org). Any online images and printed with this file. / © German Historical Institute Washington, excepting third-party materials and without prejudice to the rights of individual authors.