This post is written to accompany a new Society and Space article, 'Disrupting migration stories: reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity', that takes a fresh look at how concepts from mobility studies, together with a biographical oral history approach, can productively query the way migration is understood, while keeping the connections between structural inequalities and mobility/fixity fully in view.

Reeves’ fascinating and persuasively written ethnography explores the borders of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, today part of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The borders of the Ferghana Valley have regularly been depicted by academic and policy-oriented literature as too complicated in terms of their spatial patterns, too arbitrary with respect to the population groups they unite or separate, and not sufficiently delimited with regard to ambiguities arising from shared spaces.

In this interview, Holger Pötzsch and Chiara Brambilla discuss a range of theoretical and methodological issues in border research.

I write about Casey and Watkins’s very timely book, in the shadow of yet another staging of the US’s struggle with its imperial and racial history, on the one hand, and its project and promise to be a beacon of light for the "tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free"—to paraphrase—on the other hand. This book is a celebration, and invitation to a reaffirmation, of this project and promise.

I argue that we might consider asylum not as a process or a legal status, but as a material-discursive collective that takes shape differently across different spaces. The materials that constitute asylum – the forms, letters, certificates, bodies and belongings – take meaning and make meaning as they are enrolled in, and become part of, new spaces, discourses and practices.