Pensar a partir dos migrantes: a perspectiva de Thomas e Znaniecki

Thinking from migrants: the perspective of Thomas and Znaniecki

Abstract

The management of migration policies builds immigration as a problem, especially when these moving bodies participate in disputes and social disruptions in urban spaces. This paper, on the other hand, assumes the challenge of taking the migratory phenomenon as a perspective. William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1974) became a milestone in migratory studies mainly for consolidating a research methodology in which the dense description of a social situation was built with a remarkable emphasis on what women and men said about themselves. It is a proposal to apprehend migration through its transits and, above all, as a subjective experience based on the relations of migrants, the networks they organize and their narratives. It aims to delineate and dispute an epistemology about contemporary migratory movements, in order to rescue the prominent power of this classic ethnography: to think of the migrants as a methodological bias and as a political practice.