Movers and Makers: Uncertainty, Resilience and Migrant Creativity in Worlds of Flux - Paperback

by Parminder Bhachu (Author)

We live in times of extreme change. There could be no better time than now to interrogate the lives of new kinds of people, movers and makers, who navigate fragility and uncertainty to create with daring, often against great odds. Parminder Bhachu uses their dramatic life stories to uncover what makes for creativity and resilience in times of disequilibrium. What can be learnt from their creative moxie as innovators outside establishment powers? Why has their creative reach grown exponentially in our globally connected twenty-first century? How have their abilities to innovate been catalyzed without subscription to knowledge hierarchies and monopolies? These culturally dexterous movers who possess movement capital, advanced with every migration, have translated ancient maker and craft skills into transforming modern technology, science, design, architecture, and the arts. Generous, inclusive, and deeply collaborative, they are at the heart of open source sharing for collective intelligence, the common good, and the maker movement. They invigorate the economies they reside in greatly enhancing creative capacities and reach. Bhachu, herself a multiple-migrant maker, offers us a model for a hopeful way forward, bringing her unique ethnographic insights to illuminate what can be learnt about thriving in worlds of flux.

Author Biography

Parminder Bhachu is the author of both Twice Migrants and Dangerous Designs and also co-editor of both Enterprising Women and Immigration and Entrepreneurship. She is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Clark University, Massachusetts, USA. She has held a Henry R. Luce Professorship in Cultural Identities and Global Processes and has been a Director of Women's Studies. She has lived in multiple sites in East Africa, the United Kingdom, and on both the east and west coasts of the United States.