Narrating the city of Nijmegen : Migrants’ stories of their trajectories

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2012-08-14
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en
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The number of migrants who come to the Netherlands and thereby to the Dutch cities is increased the last fifteen years. The attention in the media and the politics is raising and migrants became part of social discussions. In the city of Nijmegen, the municipality tries to identify migrants who live in the city, so they can tell their story to the other inhabitants. Therefore they started a website ‘migrantenerfgoed Nijmegen’. But within the information on the website, there is a lack of information. They only focus on migrants who came to the city in one period of time, 1945 until 1985, and they are focusing primary on the countries the migrants are from, without taking into account the diversity of reasons. Because of the growing attention and the gab in the information, it is socially relevant to start this research. A research which will focus on migrants who came to the Netherlands and the city of Nijmegen with different reasons. It is also theoretically relevant to start this research, because in the recent years, the understanding of the concepts of space and place has changed. We have to look at it in a relational way of processes and networks, networks of trajectories. By focusing on the relation between the trajectories of the migrants and the city, this thesis contributes to a further theorization of space and place in the framework of an increasingly mobile world. So migrants are part of producing and reproducing the city. That is why we have to know more about those trajectories of the migrants, we have to get an in-depth understanding of the stories about their lives. That is why the narrative research method will be used in this thesis. It is a young method and it is not used very often, which makes this research methodologically relevant too. This social, theoretical and methodological relevance leads us to the aim of this research: The aim of this research is to acquire an in-depth understanding of the life trajectories of migrants, their experiences of Nijmegen and how they produce and reproduce the city, by collecting and analyzing migrant’s narratives about their life trajectories and the ‘place’ of Nijmegen in these life trajectories.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen