Studying literatures from outside one's own cultural/national/linguistic/ethnic background requires navigating through an interpretive Scylla and Charybdis. One extreme creates overly touristic readings that merely “honor” or “sample” local variations without also seeking to understand how and why they matter to a text’s reception outside its originating culture; the other assigns value to a work exclusively on the basis of its potential to transcend spatial and temporal borders. The narrow path between these two options involves remaining receptive to the unfamiliar without prejudging it – either positively or negatively – because of its alterity. Every scholar can bring his or her personal experiences and values to bear productively on a text provided that those experiences do not impart rigid expectations about what kind of literature is worthy of consideration.

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.