Acknowledgements
List of figures

Chapter 1. Introduction
Winnie Lem and Pauline Gardiner Barber

PART I: CONFIGURATION OF CLASS

Chapter 2. Strangers in a Globalising World: Class, Immobility and Livelihood among Afghan Refugee Workers in Iran
Wenona Giles

Chapter 3. New Migrants in a New Age: Globalisation, Networks and Gender in Rural Mexico
Frances Abrahamer Rothstein

Chapter 4. Relationships between the State and Mobile People: The Unequal Construction and Allocation of Risk and Trust at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Josiah Heyman

PART II: MIGRANTS AND MOBILISATION

Chapter 5. Political engagement of Latin American in the UK: Issues, strategies, and the public debate
Davide Però

Chapter 6. Resisting Fortress Europe: The everyday politics of female transnational migrants
Elisabetta Zontini

Chapter 7. Class, gender and history in political activism in Spain
Susana Narotzky

Chapter 8. Cell phones, complicity, and class politics in the Philippine labor diaspora
Pauline Gardiner Barber

PART III: COMPLICITY AND COMPLIANCE

Chapter 9. Migrants Mobilisation And The Making Of Neoliberal Citizens In Contemporary France
Winnie Lem

Chapter 10. A clash of histories: Encounters of migrant and non-migrant labourers in the Canadian automobile parts industry
Belinda Leach

Chapter 11. Worker Demobilisation In The Global Economy: Unionism And Maquiladoras In Mexico
Marie France Labrecque

Notes on Contributors

Winnie Lem is professor of International Development Studies at Trent University, Canada. Her publications include Cultivating Dissent: Work, Identity and Praxis in Rural Languedoc (SUNY Press,1997); Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique; Anthropology as Praxis (SUNY Press, 2002) [co-edited with Belinda Leach]; Confronting Capital: Critique and Engagement in Anthropology (Routledge, 2012) [co-edited with Belinda Leach and Pauline Gardiner Barber]; Migration in the 21st Century:  Political Economy and Ethnography (Routledge, 2012 [co-edited with Pauline Gardiner Barber]. She has published in American Ethnologist, Critique of Anthropology, Ethnic and Racial Studies and is currently co-editor-in-chief of Dialectical Anthropology.

Prevailing scholarship on migration tends to present migrants as the objects of history, subjected to abstract global forces or to concrete forms of regulation imposed by state and supra state organizations. In this volume, by contrast, the focus is on migrants as the subjects of history who not only react but also act to engage with and transform their worlds. Using ethnographic examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East, contributors question how and why particular forms of political struggle and collective action may, or indeed may not, be carried forward in the context of geographic and social border crossings. In doing so, they bring the dynamic relationship between class, gender, and culture to the forefront in each distinctive migration setting.