Review: Remembering Migration: Oral Histories and Heritage in Australia

Migration has been a vital element of human histories, cultures, and civilizations. Although it poses a long-standing issue, migration studies have made significant progress only in recent decades. The combination of the progress in interdisciplinary pursuits and the popularization of postmodern thought proved to be enough to establish it as a discipline in the late 1990s (Greenwood and Hunt 2003). Since then, scholars have used different approaches and scopes of analysis to tackle the phenomenon, ranging from ‘geographies of migration’ to ‘diasporas and transnationalism’ (Pisarevskaya et al. 2020). As Alejandro Portes (1997) predicted, the newly emerged pluralism contributed to the shift of focus from issues of governance to themes of families and gender in the twenty-first century. Academia and policymakers began to give more attention to the complexity of migration, thus leading to the increase of work on identity narratives, such as migrants and their descendants’ dual identities (De Fina 2003; Jens and Carbaugh 2001). However, this change did not last long.