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When it comes to migration, there is no level playing field. Some people are privileged, advantaged, and supported and others are marginalised, persecuted, and traumatised. The extension of the rights and equalities for which many people advocate, and provision of other extrinsic conditions are insufficient for wellbeing. This work asks: what is sufficient? What is it that people do—and can do—to change their experience from suffering to wellbeing when handling challenges of migration and other mobilities?What helps people when they are migrating? What have migrants experienced and learned that could be useful to others facing challenges of mobility and change? How can this learning be applied to promote greater social wellbeing and care of environments, in an increasingly mobile world?Mobilities of Self and Place documents rich conversations with regular migrants and refugees to critically consider migration history, human rights, place, self, and mobilities studies. The work explores ontological and epistemological questions of sense of self, sense of place, identity and agency. Mahni Dugan helps us understand how the relationship between sense of place and sense of self affects the ability of migrants to relocate with wellbeing. The movement from global to local, social to personal, intellectual to experiential offers a broad societal understanding of the phenomena and challenges of contemporary mobilities.

This book explores the understudied and often overlooked subject of African presence in India. It focuses on the so-called Sidis, Siddis or Habshis who occupy a unique place in Indian history. The Sidis comprise scattered communities of people of African descent who travelled and settled along the western coast of India, mainly in Gujarat, but also in Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Sri Lanka and in Sindh (Pakistan) as a result of the Indian Ocean trade from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. The work draws from extant scholarly research and documentary sources to provide a comprehensive study of people of African descent in India and sheds new light on their experiences. By employing an interdisciplinary approach across fields of history, art, anthropology, religion, literature and oral history, it provides an analysis of their negotiations with cultural resistance, survivals and collective memory. The author examines how the Sidi communities strived to construct a distinct identity in a new homeland in a polyglot Indian society, their present status, as well as their future prospects.The book will interest those working in the fields of history, sociology and social anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, and migration and diaspora studies.

In this timely examination of children of immigrants in New York and London, Natasha Kumar Warikoo asks, Is there a link between rap/hip-hop-influenced youth culture and motivation to succeed in school? Warikoo challenges teachers, administrators, and parents to look beneath the outward manifestations of youth culture -- the clothing, music, and tough talk -- to better understand the internal struggle faced by many minority students as they try to fit in with peers while working to lay the groundwork for successful lives. Using ethnographic, survey, and interview data in two racially diverse, low-achieving high schools, Warikoo analyzes seemingly oppositional styles, tastes in music, and school behaviors and finds that most teens try to find a balance between success with peers and success in school.

New forms of transnational mobility and diasporic belonging have become emblematic of a supposed ‘global'condition of uprootedness. Yet much recent theorizing of our so-called ‘postmodern'life emphasizes movement and fluidity without interrogating who and what is ‘on the move'. This original and timely book examines the interdependence of mobility and belonging by considering how homes are formed in relationship to movement. It suggests that movement does not only happen when one leaves home, and that homes are not always fixed in a single location. Home and belonging may involve attachment and movement, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries. What is the relationship between leaving home and the imagining of home itself? And having left home, what might it mean to return? How can we re-think what it means to be grounded, or to stay put? Who moves and who stays? What interaction is there between those who stay and those who arrive and leave? Focusing on differences of race, gender, class and sexuality, the contributors reveal how the movements of bodies and communities are intrinsic to the making of homes, nations, identities and boundaries. They reflect on the different experiences of being at home, leaving home, and going home. They also explore ways in which attachment to place and locality can be secured - as well as challenged - through the movements that make up our dwelling places.Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration is a groundbreaking exploration of the parallel and entwined meanings of home and migration. Contributors draw on feminist and postcolonial theory to explore topics including Irish, Palestinian, and indigenous attachments to ‘soils of significance'; the making of and trafficking across European borders; the female body as a symbol of home or nation; and the shifting grounds of ‘queer'migrations and ‘creole'identities.This innovative analysis will open up avenues of research an