Movers and makers : uncertainty, resilience, and migrant creativity in worlds of flux

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. "This book considers the impact of movement on creativity and innovation across different diasporic communities. In a highly original examination of twenty-first century migrant life, Parminder Bhachu explores what it is about these groups and individuals which predispose them to create ideas, products and markets. How is it that those who do not come from the traditional structures of power and economic capital are able to thrive and be upwardly mobile? Ethnographic material highlights the life histories and narratives of figures drawn from the worlds of art, science, film, technology, architecture, music and product design, to illustrate themes such as racism, representation, displacement and cultural inheritance"-- Provided by publisher