Narrating Entanglements: Rethinking the Local/Global Divide in Ethnographic Migration Research

This paper interrogates the emerging practices of narrative methods in research that focuses on mobility and migration. It seeks to understand how these methods enable a conceptualization of global politics that challenges the global/local divide, revealing instead complex entanglements through which the local and the global are mutually constituted. Focusing in particular on the primacy of narrative, and on the concept of “translation,” the paper argues that participants in research author narratives in ways that reveal alternative, powerful accounts of global politics that are meaning-making and demand an understanding of “local” knowledges as valid and important insights into how global politics is understood. Ultimately, these methods engage the heterogeneous, multiple, and ultimately fully relational narratives of individuals who are autonomous and creative, and the ways these accounts interrupt the dominant narratives of how the world is politically understood—and is politically practiced.