In addition to summarising the key findings from the previous six chapters of the book, this concluding chapter is a call for solidarities across differences to enable care as a culturally inflected emotional framework that governs all our relations with others. It argues that in times of increasing socioeconomic precarity due to neoliberal policies and public health emergencies, and their amplification of racial divides, there are instances where the embodied capacities of care are working for collective change. Examples of this include migrants and refugees demonstrating their agency through a range of food-based social enterprises servicing the elderly, the sick and stranded overseas students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following Berg and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, such reclamations of agency ultimately call for a dismantling of the guest– host binaries that have been used to characterise the emotions of migration in the public sphere (2018). The departing case study presented in this concluding chapter is that of an ensemble film based in Western Sydney that was created by writers from culturally diverse migrant and refugee communities residing within its suburbs. This example is one of centring the agential storytelling of and by migrants, albeit not shying away from interrogating stereotypes and claiming an affective space in a mainstream film festival. It is only when transformative emotions change the tone and content of the public debate about those migrants and refugees who are in our community that we can begin addressing the even greater precarity of those rendered completely immobile (such as refugees in detention centres and camps, domestic workers, and their offspring who are considered stateless).

Chapter summaries

This book commenced with an overview of the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, and how this approach is calling for a reconfiguration of traditional migration studies. Such an adaptation entails viewing migration as more than a sum of rational choices by migrants, or on issues of migration, and thereby also centring their agency in a holistic sense. In doing so, the book is particularly interested in those complex affects associated with migration in the public sphere, and which are mediated through various platforms that have the potential to be transformative emotions of social change. The subsequent three parts therefore focused on case studies from migratory contexts in the Global North explicating ‘empathy’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘belonging’.