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In the 1980s, numerous scientific surveys documented both declining bird populations, especially among Neotropical songbirds that winter in the tropics, and the loss of tropical rain forest habitat. Drawing the seemingly obvious conclusion, scientists and environmental activists linked songbird declines to loss of tropical habitats and alerted the world to an impending ecological catastrophe. Their warnings led to the establishment of the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Program, also known as Partners in Flight, the self-proclaimed largest conservation effort in history.

Looking back over more than a decade of efforts to save migrant birds, John Faaborg offers the first serious evaluation of the state of songbird populations today, the effectiveness of conservation programs such as Partners in Flight, and the reliability and completeness of scientific research on migrant birds. Taking neither an alarmist nor a complacent approach, he shows that many factors besides habitat loss affect bird populations and that Neotropical migrants as a group are not declining dramatically, though some species adapt to habitat alteration more successfully than others. Faaborg's state-of-the-art survey thus clarifies the kinds of information we will need and the conservation efforts we should undertake to ensure the long-term survival of Neotropical migrant birds.

Migration journeys are arduous, with migrants tormented by risk, abuse, threats, and xenophobia. Shelters, staffed by humanitarian workers and volunteers, provide safe spaces for those in transit. Shelter on the Journey examines how these sites, often faith-based civil society associations, create solidarity and help politicize migrants, giving them a sense of themselves as an empowered, rights-holding people.

Solano, who volunteered at shelters in Mexico, chronicles the activity in three of the nearly 100 shelters along a unique humanitarian trail that many Central Americans take to reach the United States. She outlines the constraints faced by these sites and their potential to create social transformation and considers how and why migration security is currently framed and managed as both a criminal and humanitarian issue.

Shelter on the Journey explores the politics of the shelters, their social world, and the dynamics of charity and solidarity, as well as the need for humanitarian assistance and advocacy for dignified and free transit migration.

An anthology that evokes the music, residents, and vibrant nightlife of migrants in cities around the world.
 
Sonic Signatures interprets the music of contemporary migrants from Montreal to Rotterdam, Oslo to Tokyo. Drawing on research in urban musicology, international migration, and the emerging field of night studies, this edited volume illustrates that sonic signatures are fundamental to nighttime cityscapes, a way of experiencing space and belonging. Contributors to the anthology consider a wide array of genres—including EDM, batida do gueto, and iSicathamiya—to understand how migrants resist oppression, long for people and places, and shape their adopted cities through music. 

In 2010, when The New Yorker published a list of twenty writers under the age of forty who were “key to their generation,” it included five Jewish-identified writers, two of whom—American Gary Shteyngart and Canadian David Bezmozgis—were Soviet-born. This publicity came after nearly a decade of English-language literary output by Soviet-born writers of all genders in North America. Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction traces the impact of these now numerous authors—among others, David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, and Lara Vapnyar—on major coordinates of the Jewish American imaginary.

Entering an immigrant, Soviet-born standpoint creates an alternative and sometimes complementary pattern of how the Eastern and Central European past and present resonate with American Jewishness. The novels, short stories, and graphic novels considered here often stage strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, genealogy, and finally, migration. Soviet-Born demonstrates how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.
 

Antimigrant populism is on the rise across Europe, and diversity and multiculturalism are increasingly presented as threats to social cohesion. Yet diversity is also a mundane social reality in urban neighborhoods. With this in mind, Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture explores how we can live together with difference. What is needed for conviviality to emerge and what role can research play? This volume demonstrates how collaboration among scholars, civil society and practitioners can help to answer these questions. 
Drawing on a range of innovative and participatory methods, each chapter examines conviviality in different cities across the United Kingdom. The contributors ask how the research process itself can be made more convivial and show how power relations between researchers, those researched, and research users can be reconfigured—in the process producing much needed new knowledge and understanding about urban diversity, multiculturalism and conviviality. Examples include embroidery workshops with diverse faith communities, arts work with child language brokers in schools, and life story and walking methods with refugees. Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture is interdisciplinary in scope and includes contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists, as well as chapters by practitioners and activists. It provides fresh perspectives on methodological debates in qualitative social research, and will be of interest to scholars, students, practitioners, activists, and policymakers who work on migration, urban diversity, conviviality and conflict, and integration and cohesion.