Multisensory Approaches in Migration Studies

Challenging decades of scholarship dominated by textual and state-centred perspectives, this volume reveals how people's multisensory experiences, including smell, touch, sound, and taste, shape migrants' journeys and lives as profoundly as borders, policies, and places do.

Multisensory Approaches in Migration Studies rethinks how we understand human mobility by placing the sensing, feeling body at the centre of migration research. Challenging decades of scholarship dominated by textual and state-centred perspectives, this volume reveals how people's multisensory experiences, including smell, touch, sound, and taste, shape migrants' journeys and lives as profoundly as borders, policies, and places do. Drawing on developments of the ‘sensory turn’ across anthropology, geography, and sociology, the book demonstrates how embodied memories, sensorial encounters, and everyday multisensory practices can uncover new dimensions of displacement, belonging, and transnational life. The contributors explore diverse contexts from forests at the EU's eastern frontier to migrant kitchens, urban streets, digital platforms, and cross-border commutes. This collection illustrates how sensory approaches mediate both the intimate, lived textures of migration and the structural forces that impact migrating people. By reconnecting the body to space, time, and movement, it offers an innovative lens for scholars, students, and practitioners seeking to understand migration beyond conventional frameworks. The book is essential reading for migration researchers, anthropologists, geographers, and anyone interested in embodied approaches to understanding human mobility in contemporary society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.