Journeyalogy: Other-stories and counter-mappings of migration

Dear Colleagues,

The title ‘Journeyalogy’ signals a commitment to rethinking how migration is narrated, experienced, understood, and represented in the context of genealogical narratives. Traditional framings of migration—whether academic, policy-oriented, or media-driven—often reproduce colonial, normative, or exclusionary assumptions about journey, belonging, and identity. Even well-intentioned “novel” approaches can inadvertently rely on familiar tools that appear decolonial but ultimately reproduce established epistemologies and hierarchies. This Special Issue invites contributors to consider “Other-stories”: both the stories of those categories as “migrant”, therefore “Other”, and the other ways of sharing stories often excluded from canonical framings. We invite exploration of migration in the context of genealogy through alternative epistemologies, decolonial and anticolonial approaches, including counter-mappings and other creative or experimental methods that foreground marginalised voices and ethical engagement. We welcome work that challenges dominant paradigms, interrogates inherited methodologies, and imagines new ways to represent and understand the complex, fragmented, plural realities of migration.

Background and Rationale

Migration has long been a central concern in public, political, and academic debates—framed variously as a crisis (“forced” or “illegal” migration); an opportunity (“economic” migration); a site of resilience and creativity (the “brave refugee”). Yet, research on migration continues to carry the weight of colonial legacies, dominant epistemologies, and inherited methodological assumptions. Decolonial and anticolonial approaches call for centring marginalised voices, interrogating dominant frameworks, and imagining alternative ways of knowing, narrating, and understanding journeys of migration.

While a growing body of scholarship has explored migration narratives in recent years—highlighting questions of identity, belonging, representation, and power—there remains a need to push this work further, particularly in the context of genealogical narratives of migration. Much of the existing research, while valuable, often remains tethered to established frameworks or risks reproducing normative understandings of mobility and displacement. There is scope and need—and indeed urgency—for more disruptive, unconventional, and even unruly approaches that interrogate not just the stories we tell about migration but also the epistemologies and methodologies through which we tell them.

As Hannah Arendt (1958) observed, attention to storytelling, narrative, and dialogue is a critical tool for understanding power relations, contested perspectives, and lived realities. Narratives are not merely descriptive; they actively shape how migration is understood, experienced, and valued. To engage critically with migration today is to recognise that telling these stories—and reimagining how they are told—is not only an intellectual project but also a political and ethical necessity. At the same time, Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This Special Issue takes this provocation seriously, asking how we can move beyond inherited frameworks to craft creative, ethical, and inclusive approaches to migration scholarship in the context of genealogical narratives. How can we tell migration stories differently—in ways that foreground marginalised voices, embrace methodological pluralism, even uncertainty and discomfort, and challenge dominant epistemologies?

This Special Issue calls for work that not only seeks to document but to privilege Other-stories: to expand our understanding around genealogical narratives of migration by exploring alternative epistemologies and methodologies, decolonial and anticolonial approaches, and creative or experimental methods that foreground marginalised voices, ethical engagement, and counter-narratives (Tuck & Yang, 2014). We are particularly interested in “wild” and experimental narrative forms—autoethnography that blurs the boundary between researcher and subject, creative writing that reimagines futures of migration (El-Tayeb, 2020), multimodal and multilingual storytelling that combines text, sound, image, and performance, and collaborative or participatory methods that centre polyphony and disrupt singular authorship (Fine, 2018).

Scope and topics

We welcome work that interrogates dominant frameworks, explores silenced stories, and opens up new spaces for thinking about migration journeys in the context of genealogy. Possible Topics may include:

• How narratives of migration are constructed, circulated, contested, and resisted across generations in the context of genealogy;
• How maps and counter-mapping can become narrative tools to resist and reframe dominant stories (and histories) of migration;
• Migratory journeys as key elements of identity and belonging, often across generations;
• Engagement with decolonial, anticolonial, Indigenous, or anti-methodologies to rethink research and representation of migration journeys;
• Creative, artistic, and experimental storytelling about migratory journeys, including multilingual approaches;
• Ethical challenges in researching and representing migrant lives, including questions of voice, authority, translation, and consent;
• Silences, omissions, and erasures in dominant migration narratives;
• How migrant communities themselves narrate home, belonging, displacement, and return;
• Researcher positionality and co-production of knowledge in migration research.

Formats and Contributions

In the spirit of methodological openness and ethical engagement, we welcome diverse formats, including:

• Scholarly articles
• Creative writing
• Visual essays
• Multimedia interventions
• Multilingual approaches
• Autoethnographies
• Collaborative projects

Interdisciplinary Dialogue

This Special Issue seeks to foster dialogue across academic disciplines and between academic, activist, and artistic voices. By bringing these perspectives together, we hope to cultivate a polyphonic conversation about migration, attentive to the possibilities of alternative narratives, ethical methodologies, and decolonial imagination in the context of genealogy.

EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

Please email an abstract of 300 words and a short bio of each author to guest editors by 10th January 2026:

lina.fadel@hw.ac.uk

esa.aldegheri@glasgow.ac.uk

References

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.

El-Tayeb, F. (2020). European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. University of Minnesota Press.

Fine, M. (2018). Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination. Teachers College Press.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-Words: Refusing Research. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry (pp. 223–248). SAGE.

Further reading:

Ahmed, S. (1999). Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(3), 329–347.

Bhambra, G. K. (2016). Whither Europe? Postcolonial versus Neocolonial Cosmopolitanism. Interventions, 18(2), 187–202.

Chambers, I. (2020). Posthuman Migration and the Imaginary of the Border. Routledge.

Coutin, S. B. (2005). Being En Route. American Anthropologist, 107(2), 195–206.

De Genova, N. (2017). The Borders of "Europe": Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. Duke University Press.

Malkki, L. (1995). Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. University of Chicago Press.

Mayblin, L., & Turner, J. (2021). Migration Studies and Colonialism. Polity.

Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press.

Papastergiadis, N. (2000). The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Polity.

Dr. Lina Fadel
Dr. Esa Aldegheri
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.