Among us… Or the need to rethink the construction of otherness in migratory contexts

Abstract

Since the mid 90’s, we are attending within the field of the studies on migrations in Spain, to the development of an important line of research that seeks to explain the social construction process of the «migrant» as a social figure of otherness. By embracing a constructionist and dynamist perspective, this article makes halt for re-thinking the manner in which the social construction of the otherness which is linked to the contemporaneous context of migration has been studied, and after observing that in such studies an Orientalist grammar is predominant, we are in favour for rendering the explanatory strategies of the process of identity or its correlates, the process of otherness more complex.