Call For Papers

Special issue:        Faravid – Journal for Historical and Archaeological Studies

Abstracts deadline:15 June 2025.

Publication date:    Summer 2026

Guest editors:        Moussa Pourya Asl, Henry Oinas-Kukkonen, and Johanna Leinonen

Language:              English, or Finnish

Transatlantic Mobilities: Migration, Memory, and the Making of Modernity

Migration across the Atlantic—voluntary and coerced, temporary and permanent—has profoundly shaped the modern world. From the forced displacement of millions during the transatlantic slave trade to the circulations of labor, ideas, and capital between Europe, the Americas, and Africa, the Atlantic world has long functioned as a crucible of global transformation. This special issue invites scholars to critically examine the historical, cultural, and epistemological implications of transatlantic migration, past and present, through interdisciplinary lenses grounded in the humanities.

We seek contributions that interrogate the transatlantic not merely as a geographic space but as a dynamic epistemic and political formation—one shaped by the asymmetries of empire, the logics of capital, and the contested grammars of identity and belonging. As Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) compellingly argues, the Atlantic is a space of hybridity and rupture, where diasporic movements interrupt nationalist historiographies and make visible the entangled genealogies of modernity. Similarly, the critical reorientation of migration studies by scholars such as Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991), Saskia Sassen (1998), and Judith Butler (2009) has foregrounded how global movement is fundamentally about power—about who moves freely, who is moved, and who is immobilized.

This issue takes up these provocations to explore how histories and narratives of migration across the Atlantic destabilize national borders and categories, challenging methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) and foregrounding the transnational production of subjectivity, space, and history. We welcome papers that attend to the racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions of migration; interrogate the afterlives of empire; and analyze how migration configures cultural memory, political economy, and modes of governance.

Crucially, this issue aims to bridge historical depth with contemporary urgency. Today’s crises—ranging from the Mediterranean and Central American refugee emergencies to the rise of xenophobic populisms and the criminalization of migration—must be situated within longer trajectories of displacement, extraction, and empire. As scholars like Didier Fassin (2011) and Achille Mbembe (2003) remind us, migration is increasingly governed through regimes of surveillance, humanitarianism, and exclusion that reproduce colonial logics under neoliberal guises.

We invite submissions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Transatlantic genealogies of migration: slavery, indenture, labor, exile
• Migration, empire, and the racial logics of modernity
• Cultural memory and diasporic archives in literature, art, and oral history
• Biopolitics, borders, and the securitization of mobility
• The role of migration in shaping transatlantic political and cultural institutions
• Narratives of belonging, unbelonging, and the precarity of migrant subjectivity
• Feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives on migration and transatlanticism
• Literary and ethnographic representations of displacement and home-making
• Migration and the reconfiguration of the public sphere: protest, media, and the arts
• Comparative diasporas and the ethics of return, memory, and transgenerational trauma
• Epistemologies of migration: archives, silences, and critical methodology

We particularly encourage submissions that unsettle dominant frameworks of migration as either crisis or integration, and instead foreground migration as a structural and constitutive force of modern life. Migration must be understood not only as the movement of people across borders, but as a profound transformation of social worlds, cultural imaginaries, and historical consciousness.

This special issue seeks to assemble critical scholarship that rethinks the transatlantic as both a site and a method—one that renders visible the interrelations between the local and the global, the past and the present, the body and the state. Contributions may engage with literary texts, ethnographic work, visual culture, critical historiography, and/or political theory. We welcome proposals from across the humanities, including but not limited to history, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and migration studies.

Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts of 200–300 words should be submitted by 15 June 2025.
Notification of acceptance will be issued by 30 June 2025.
Full papers (5,000–7,000 words) are due by 30 November 2025.

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or Finnish

For submissions and inquiries, please contact Moussa Pourya Asl at: moussa.pouryaAsl@gmail.com
More information about Faravid can be found at: https://faravid.journal.fi/index

References

Balibar, É., & Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities. Verso.

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso.

Fassin, D. (2011). Humanitarian reason: A moral history of the present. University of California Press.

Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press.

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11

Sassen, S. (1998). Globalization and its discontents: Essays on the new mobility of people and money. The New Press.

Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and the study of migration. European Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 217–240. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397560200108X