Making Sense of One Another in Crossing Borders: Social Cognition and Migration Politics

In “Making Sense of One Another in Crossing Borders: Social Cognition and Migration Politics,” special editors Ilka Vari-Lavoisier and Susan T. Fiske, with consulting editors Christophe Nordman and Douglas S. Massey, convene a group of scholars to discuss how “new intellectual approaches—ideas crossing disciplinary borders—can inform our understanding of people crossing borders—migration-based social diversity—and the design of public policies in diverse societies.”

Through discussions of cognition and labor market mobility in India to anxiety among natives and migrants in the UK after the Brexit vote, Fiske and Vari-Lavoisier and their authors paint a picture of how individual cognition influences an individual’s decision to migrate, or their view on migrants’ social status, or their view of migrants’ religious conversion, among other topics. From this individual cognition frame, the editors and authors discuss how broader social and public policy views are shaped. “In other words,” Fiske and Vari-Lavoisier write in their introduction to the volume, “this first volume on the cognition and migration nexus stands as an invitation to deepen the analysis of the relationships among internal mental processes, collective representations, social practices, political structures, and socioeconomic change.”