Migrant Cultural Studies
Summary
Migrant cultural studies examines how people on the move create, transmit and transform cultural practices across borders. Rooted in interdisciplinary inquiry, it considers literature, music, film, visual arts, foodways, language and digital media as arenas in which migrants articulate identity, memory and belonging. Researchers explore cultural hybridity and diaspora imaginaries by tracing transnational circuits of production and consumption, and by analysing the everyday enactments of culture in community festivals, religious rituals, artistic collaborations and online platforms. Methodologies range from ethnography and archival research to social network analysis and computational mapping, enabling both richly detailed case studies and comparative overviews. Central concerns include the politics of representation, power relations within and between migrant groups, and the role of institutional frameworks—heritage agencies, educational curricula, immigration policies—in shaping cultural expression. Studies highlight migrants as cultural innovators who foster intercultural dialogue, resist exclusion and contribute to new narratives in host societies, while also interrogating intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality within diasporic communities.
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Migrant Cultural Studies publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in migrant cultural studies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Cultural hybridity: The blending of practices and meanings from multiple traditions to create new cultural forms.
Epistemic injustice: The undermining of individuals’ credibility as knowers, often silencing their cultural knowledge and experiences.
Chosen families: Networks of kinship formed through emotional and cultural bonds rather than blood or legal ties.
Transnational cultural circuit: The interconnected networks through which cultural goods, ideas and practices move between migrant communities and multiple geographic locations.
References
- Improving SOGI Asylum Adjudication: Putting Persecution Ahead of Identity. Refugee Survey Quarterly (2021).
- “As queer refugees, we are out of category, we do not belong to one, or the other”: LGBTIQ+ refugees’ experiences in “ambivalent” queer spaces. Ethnic and Racial Studies (2022).
- Utterly Unbelievable: The Discourse of ‘Fake’ SOGI Asylum Claims as a Form of Epistemic Injustice. International Journal of Refugee Law (2022).
- Queer kinship and the rights of refugee families. Migration Studies (2021).
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