Migrants thinkers storytellers: negotiating meaning and making life in Bloemfontein, South Africa

Abstract

Migrants, Thinkers, Storytellers develops an argument about how individual migrants, coming from four continents and diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, are in many ways affected by a violent categorisation that is often nihilistic, insistently racial, and continuously significant in the organisation of South African society. The book also examines how relative privilege and storytelling function as instruments for migrants to negotiate meanings and shape their lives. It employs narrative life story research as its guiding methodology and applies various disciplinary analytical perspectives, with an overall focus on social categorisation and its consequences. The featured stories stress how unsettled, mutable, and in flux social categories and identities are just as a messy pencil sketch challenges clear definitions.