Building Citizenship from Below

Book excerpt: Focusing on the ‘precarity-agency-migration nexus’, this book leverages the political, economic, and social dynamics of migration to better understand deepening inequality and popular resistance. Drawing on rich ethnographic and interview-based studies of the USA and Latin America, the authors show how migrants are navigating and challenging conditions of insecurity and structures of power. Anchoring the study of migration in the opposition between precarity and agency, the authors provide a new window into the continuously unfolding relationship between national borders, global capitalism, and human freedom. This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.