Migrant Knowledge

Migrant Knowledge

Tag: historiography

The author interrogates a mid-nineteenth-century map for German emigrants, using it as a way to talk about the central concept behind this blog, "migrant knowledge".

An 1853 Map for German-Speaking Emigrants

Mark R. Stoneman

Reflections on children's agency in historiography in the run-up to a workshop on the theme. The authors engage with Sarah Mazah's 2020 article in the American Historical Review.

Reflections on Children’s Agency (in Migration)

Bettina Hitzer
Friederike Kind-Kovács

Visual and auditory metaphors shape the historiography of encounter, including research on translators in nineteenth-century Alaska.

Metaphors and the Historiography of Encounter

Trying to understand German migration to the United States in the nineteenth century raises the problem of how the U.S. migration regime shaped the data that researchers rely on in the first place.

Why the History of Knowledge Matters in a Digital History of Migration

Sebastian F. Bondzio

"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

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

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

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

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

Simone Lässig, “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 59 (Fall 2016): 29–59.

The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda