About the project
Globalization, labor market needs, armed conflict and deteriorating socioeconomic situations have resulted in increased transnational migration globally. This mobility as well as varying legal definitions and transnational migration management policies have resulted in many people fluctuating between regular and irregular migrant status with variable entitlement to welfare, residency and work. They live temporarily in any one location, serially crossing national borders and moving in and out of multiple geographies and sociocultural communities, hence the concept trans-migration. The objective of this project is to initiate a cooperation between research groups at the UC Berkeley, the University of Oslo and Norwegian University of Science and Technology that are engaged in research on transnational migration and health, combining approaches from social sciences, in particular ethnographic methods, with social medicine and public health.
Objectives
1) to join analytical forces from social anthropology, sociology, public health, education, and social welfare on the issues of trans-migration and health,
2) to produce new knowledge in comparative perspective in Europe and the U.S. regarding emerging social organizations among trans-migrants
Background
The project is a continuation of an initiative taken by Seth Holmes at the UC Berkeley, Heidi Fjeld at Helsam in 2015, with the more recent addition of sociologist Johan Fredrik Ryeat at NTNU in 2017 and Gunn Elin Fedreheim at University of Tromsø in 2018.