Call for Submissions: for journal Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture special issue: Forms, limits, and future directions of storytelling in migration research. Deadline: 30 September 2026.
Issue editors: Lena Englund (University of Eastern Finland) and Kaiju Harinen (Migration Institute of Finland, University of Turku)
Much of migration research in the social sciences and humanities has been centred on bringing to light the experiences and stories of individuals and groups who have been marginalized, misrepresented or sometimes outright ignored in official discourse and dominant narratives. Stories can both reinforce existing societal discourses as well as function as a counterforce. That makes stories and storytelling a tool with which to perform political work in terms of how migration is debated and portrayed. Studies in the humanities build on storytelling in relation to the material examined, people interviewed or otherwise engaged with, and in the published research itself. Storytelling is here understood in a broad sense of the term, used for personal self-understanding, meaning making and communication, but also in politicized contexts, for example relating to how migration and migrants are addressed and depicted in the media. Migration is understood broadly as the movement of people in both voluntary and involuntary contexts, and limits are not to be seen as boundaries that may not be traversed, but also as a chance to probe further, to test new theoretical frameworks and to bring together case studies in novel ways.
This special issue offers the opportunity to think further about what defines, restrains and generates storytelling in migration research in the humanities. Papers are invited from scholars as widely as possible, encouraging inter- and multidisciplinary approaches to storytelling in migration research about the challenges and limits involved with for example textual approaches, participatory methods and activist research. Theoretical engagements with storytelling in various contexts are welcome, as are studies relating to methodological concerns. Case studies of cultural expressions (e.g. fiction or nonfiction, films, the media) relating to the theme of the special issue are also much appreciated.



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