In the final decades of the 20th century, issues such as identity, Otherness and the role of social and cultural boundaries have been prominent in social theory, sociology and cultural studies. In this context, an analysis of Bauman's work is important because it raises pertinent questions pertaining to the nature of social and cultural boundaries and the nature of boundary construction under modernity. The metaphors of inside and outside and the idea of the boundary are significant in Bauman's critique of (...) modernity's search for a meta-order and in his examination of strangerhood. The article illustrates how this ordering process manifests itself at the individual and societal levels of modernity. Bauman's contention is that modernity's search for a meta-order leads to the construction of boundaries and to exclusionary practices. It is the presence of the Third, for Bauman, which threatens the certainty of order. Different images of the stranger in Bauman's work are identified and the ways in which Bauman's conception of freedom and `community' is intrinsically linked to his work on the ambivalent stranger are demonstrated. (shrink)

The idea of experience has been taken at face value in scholarly accounts of the migration experience, consequently very little attention has been given to how this idea has acquired its meaning and how it relates to the category of the ‘migration experience’. This article provides an analytical investigation into the nature of the phenomenon known as the ‘migrant experience’; firstly, by examining mediated and non-mediated conceptions of experience as well as an alternative account of experience associated with strangeness/disruption. Through (...) this conceptual lens, I then critically consider how the migration experience, as an analytical construct, has been constituted through a spatial–temporal framework, a critical migration perspective, and within the phenomenological and existential accounts. In conclusion, these approaches, as I will demonstrate, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, rather they complement and, at times, are in tension with each other. Such an examination will provide some conceptual clarity that is currently lacking in empirical work on an ‘experience’ categorized as migration. (shrink)