KL: Doris Bachmann-Medick: Migration as Translation

Migration today is often viewed as a global flow of people and as transnational mobility – and therefore an important element of an emerging cosmopolitan society that celebrates the crossing of borders. This view is, in many ways, too simple and smooth.  Beyond conventional large-scale frameworks (including “methodological nationalism“),  it is the category of translation that can bring to the fore the ruptures and frictions in the shifting contexts of small-scale processes of migration. The lecture discusses various theoretical “models of translation,“ which can be useful for the analysis of migratory experiences of various groups (illegal migrants, victims of human trafficking, the new cosmopolitan elites, or mass consumers). As a migratory practice itself translation is concerned with a displacement of meanings, but of people as well. As an analytical category translation sheds new light on the agency of migrants (as translators, cultural brokers, self-translators, using shared reference points such as human rights) – but also on their frequent condition of being translated and defined by others.