Anthem Series on Global Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region – serie

Transforming the Politics of Mobility and Migration in Aotearoa New Zealand is a future-focused edited collection that formulates alternative paradigms that can lead to a more just and ethical politics of mobility and migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Examining a variety of topics, the book addresses the challenges of structural discrimination, integration and migrant rights framed within larger regional and global concerns. Collectively, the contributors advance perspectives on social justice and migrant rights, specifically addressing issues of ethics, collective well-being and solidarities.The collection brings together leading and early career scholars paired with practitioners in the migrations sector. Developing conceptual knowledge in migration studies, it fills a gap in the sparse literature on the politics of migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. While theoretically engaged and of value to the research community, the book also follows recent calls to better communicate the complexities of migration to policy makers, with accessible chapters that address a range of issues faced by migrants and speak to a wide audience.

Using digital storytelling—a new media genre that began in California in the late 1990s and that proliferated across ‘the West’ in the 2000s—as a site of analysis, this book asks, ‘What is done in the name of the everyday?’ Like everyday multiculturalism, digital storytelling is promoted as an accessible, enabling, and ordinary phenomenon that represents cultural experience more accurately than official sites. As such, the genre frequently houses stories of migration, community, and ethnic and racial differences. In turn, digital story collections often act as digital monuments or repositories of multiculturalism, giving a digital life to narratives of migration, cultural difference, and national belonging. This is evidenced in one of the world’s largest public collections of digital stories, found in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and referenced throughout this book. Using examples from this collection and pointing to comparable ones in the UK and North America, this book investigates how notions of the everyday become a channel through which certain long-standing discourses of race get redeployed in multicultural nations. What can digital storytelling teach us about the status and future of multiculturalism in these societies? Can digital storytelling re-mediate multiculturalism in new, progressive ways?