| Summary/Abstract |
This special issue examines the upsurge of crises that confront certain migrants, identifying the contested positions of these migrants from the critical vantage point of the autonomy of migration. This line of inquiry was developed principally by scholars and activists in the late 1990s, who revolutionised the deterministic, prominent rhetoric of control and exclusion that was the self-fulfilling discourse in western cities where any influx of migrants was routinely met with regulatory mechanisms. In this milieu, autonomist approaches to migration emphasise negative dimensions of citizenship and fundamentally challenge hegemonic conceptualisations of migration by focusing on migrants’ agency, subjectivity and sense of community. In the context of migration, autonomy is an action of independence, the search for the self-management of one’s life. Conceptually, the framework of autonomous migration arises from the viewpoint that migrant mobilities confer boundless creativity of human agency and adaptability to alternative ways of living.
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