Migrants‘ relations with nature
Natural environment is an indiscernible part of migration experience. While several research fields such as ethnobotany or political ecology have developed their own approaches to studying the relations between the two, the perspective of leisure studies allows for interpreting the migrants’ relations with nature from a novel vantage point. In this talk I will rely on the material collected in the course of several research projects devoted to the role of leisure in migratory experience, including the international comparative study on the role of natural environment in the processes of migrant adaptation that was carried out in the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany and Poland among migrants from Latin America, China, Morocco, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam. I will focus on the everyday contacts between migrants and urban greenspaces, accentuating the plural and ambivalent features of these socionatures: they participate in developing migrants’ sense of belonging to a new place of residence, while simultaneously acting as venues where migration regimes are latently present. I will offer a critical reflection on migrants’ “biophilia” and “biophobia” as politicized constructs.
