Editorial: Infrastructures and migration

Abstract

The article intends to bring together two perspectives on analysing and understanding societal developments and transformations. It takes infrastructures and migration as cases to discuss how a focus on infrastructures' role in migration processes can inform migration studies and how, in turn, a focus on migration processes can inform studies on and theories of infrastructures. Based on the assumption that studies on infrastructures can be carried out in all fields of society, as we find infrastructures in all societal sectors, and that migration, in turn, affects all fields of society and all its sectors, we shed light on the particular forms that infrastructures take in the course of migration journeys and the actors that are involved; the effects the infrastructures have on migrants and their (im-)mobility; the role they play before, during and after the migration; and how they are co-constituted by actors and co-create social, spatial and physical settings. The article provides the reader with an overview of key strands of research in both infrastructure studies and migration studies and develops an infrastructure-sensitive perspective for research carried out in the field of migration studies.