For Routed’s first issue, we have invited writers to reflect on the terms in our name’s wordplay: roots and routes. In the following articles, they challenge perceptions of migrations as a binary choice between these two images of staying and moving, belonging and leaving, being stuck and running free. Are we humans really faced with such a dilemma? How do politics, markets, and cultures create it and reshape it? What are the consequences of this narrative over people's lives, and how do migrants think of themselves in the light of it? What alternative ideas are emerging?

 

We look at these questions through the lenses of the budding second generation in Chile and the camera filming an immigrant detention centre in Australia; following a Venezuelan mother across the Colombian border; in the business of ancestry tests; and in the middle of the UK housing crisis and the humanitarian – and political – crisis in the Mediterranean.

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Meet us at the intersection between roots and routes.

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