This second volume of Migration and Society marks our continued intellectual engagement with authors, artists, and guest editors to make the journal a dynamic platform for exchange and debate across disciplines and fields of thought and action around the issue of migration. Migration continues to be an ongoing issue of global import, and in the past few years we have seen powerful stakeholders around the world developing processes, dialogues, policies, and programs to respond to the challenges and questions that it raises. As editors of Migration and Society, we remain committed to the importance of fostering critical examinations of, and reflections on, migration and the way it is framed and understood by all actors. As these processes and policies have increasingly aimed to “control,” “manage,” “contain,” and “prevent” migration, the need for careful attention to migrants’ everyday practices, desires, aspirations, and fears is particularly urgent, as is the importance of situating these both historically and geographically.

Our goals for the journal are clearly exemplified in the themed section in Volume 2, guest-edited by Annika Lems and Jelena Tošić, on “African-European Trajectories of Im/mobility: Exploring Entanglements of Experiences, Legacies, and Regimes of Contemporary Migration.” This features an introduction by Tošić and Lems, followed by a series of compelling research articles, each exploring contemporary patterns of im/mobility between Africa and Europe. The shared starting point for the articles is an epistemological framework that foregrounds migrants’ subjective experiences, from which theories and concepts are generated inductively. Taken as a whole, the collection probes the long-standing and unequal interconnectedness of Europe and Africa and the historical legacies of the entangled colonial histories of the two continents. Collectively, the articles seek to move our understanding beyond hegemonic and binary images of “Europe” and “Africa,” respectively, instead taking their point of departure in migrants’ intersubjective, everyday processes of meaning-making. They explore migrants’ complex routes and journeys, including protracted experiences of being stuck in transit, demonstrating the constant interplay between agency and restraint, movement and stasis.

The guest-edited themed section is followed by “People and Places,” featuring a smaller collection of papers on “hostile environments,” in the contexts of the UK and Denmark, respectively. The year 2018 was marked by a further hardening of hostility toward migrants across Europe and a proliferation of bordering and policing practices targeting migrants and other racialized groups. The piece by Huon Wardle and Laura Obermuller examines the symbols and lived experiences of the UK's “hostile environment” policy, focusing on the “Windrush generation” of migrants from the Caribbean and their descendants. In Denmark, such hostility is illustrated by the harsh regimes in the country's deportation centers, as examined by Julia Suárez-Krabbe and Annika Lindberg. Following that, Aydan Greatrick's contribution also continues our inaugural theme of hospitality and hostility via his analysis of the problematic politics of queer organizations which “coach” queer refugees to perform “credible” claims for protection in Lebanon and Turkey. The single piece in the “Reflections” section, by Benjamin White, represents a critical reading of the controversy surrounding the book Refuge (by Betts and Collier). The “Creative Encounters” section features poems by Eleni Philippou, reflecting on processes of “commemorating or capturing past moments, events, or persons.” This is followed by a series of book reviews on a variety of topics and themes pertaining to migration.

Going forward, Volume 3 of Migration and Society, to be published in early 2020, will focus on “Recentering the South in Studies of Migration” and will be dedicated to critical explorations of migration from and through the vantage point of Southern, decolonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial theories and methodologies. It will include a particular focus on theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of historical and contemporary processes of migration within, across, and between what can be conceptualized as “the Global South.”

We hope our readers will enjoy reading the rich and varied contributions our authors make to the journal. We continue to welcome submissions to all of the journal sections (please see www.berghahnjournals.com/migration-and-society), and especially encourage work that situates migration in a wider historical and societal context, including attention to experiences and representations of migration, critical theoretical perspectives on migration, and the social, cultural, and legal embeddedness of migration.