De l’immigré à l’émigré ?

Abstract

If no area of research can avoid resetting the life stories being studied in their context, the issue becomes exemplary in the specific field of the sociology of migrations. Is it possible to assess a migratory process with conclusions drawn from fieldwork in a single location, in accordance with the hic et nunc principle ? It is precisely because their object of study is at stake that migration studies are confronted by the spatial anchorings (necessarily plural) of the individual trajectories they aim to reconstitute, as well as by the temporal framework within which they occur. The very telling of a life story, which cannot be done both “here” and “there” at the same time, places interviewer and interviewee in a context of discourse production the effects of which need to be analyzed. Such questioning raises the issue of the impact of context – i.e. the spatial and temporal framework where the investigation is carried out – on the very telling of a life course.This paper aims to apprehend the interviewer/interviewee relationship within the framework of the investigation device, as well as the resulting process of subjectivation, in order to fully understand the contexts of enunciation of biographies, and their effects on the contextualization of life stories.

Keywords

• migrations
• life story
• device
• subjectivation
• contextualization