Everyday Poetics of Dislocation: Reflections on the Emotional, Imaginative, and Reflexive Worlds of Migrant Narratives


Maricia Fischer-Souan, Sciences Po Paris and Université de Montréal

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” the saying goes. Yet qualitative interview-based research in the social sciences seldom delves into the figurative and non-literal speech acts that proliferate in interviews. This paper offers a methodological reflection on how to enhance the lyrical sensibilities of researchers in qualitative interviewing with international migrants. Structured around the idea of everyday migrant poetics – or poetics of dislocation - it contends that imagery, emotion, and reflexive thought-processes are cornerstones of rich biographical migration narratives and require a level of inter-relational “communion” between interviewee and interviewer, as opposed to “conquest” for information. A lyrical stance allows researchers to make sharper distinctions between cognitive and affective registers of participant discourse and meaning-making. Moreover, recognizing the emotional components of biographical interviews may heighten the co-creation of knowledge and understanding, something which both the reflexive stance in the social sciences and lyrical sociology converge upon. The latter’s emphasis on momentaneity, location and emotion is highly relevant to the former’s concern with recognizing the social dynamics involved in the constitution of knowledge. Finally, and where interviewing in migration research is specifically concerned, a lyrical and emotional stance toward migrant narratives may be well equipped to illuminate the phenomenological aspects of migration, from complex processes around (return)migration decision-making and the relationship between structure and agency in migrant experience, to the spatio-temporal distinctions around meanings of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’.

This paper will be presented at the following session: