migrant heritage

Ormond, M. (2022) 'Landscape conversations', Medium, May. 

• What is the one place in the world you'd want to share with your children?​

Migrantour Sustainable Routes, Erasmus+ KA2 project, project team member through collaboration with De Voorkamer (2021-23)

Rural Migrantour, Erasmus+ KA2 project, project team member through collaboration with Pocket Stories (2021-23)

Ormond, M. & Vietti, F. (2021) 'Beyond multicultural "tolerance": guided tours and guidebooks as transformative tools for civic learning', Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 30(2-3), 533-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2021.1901908 

• In bringing people together that otherwise might have little more than passing contact with one another, tourism is appreciated for its potential to transform mindsets by fostering multi-perspectivity, a cornerstone of global citizenship education, among both ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. Hence, while tourism plays a significant role in marginalising and exploiting immigrants’ bodies, labour and heritages, it also holds significant potential as a critical pedagogical tool for transcending the limits of multicultural tolerance discourse and combatting exploitation and xenophobia. In this article, we reflect on two Europe-based global citizenship-inspired initiatives bringing together migration and tourism in novel ways: Migrantour guided walking tours and the Roots Guide guidebook. They endeavour to rework guided tours and guidebooks, two of tourism’s most common pedagogical tools, into ‘good company’ that supports the Arendtian practice of ‘visiting’ as a key mode of civic learning. In so doing, we explore the representational and structural opportunities and challenges that these two initiatives encounter as they seek to co-create multi-dimensional narratives and routes in ways that recognise guides’ diverse experiences and perceptions of the places they call home, avoid stereotypical representations of ‘communities’ and hold space for the real-life frictions that accompany diversity.

Ormond, M. (2018) ‘Adoption, genealogical bewilderment and biological heritage bricolage’, in H. Muzaini and C. Minca (eds), After Heritage: Critical Geographies of Heritage-From-Below, London: Edward Elgar, pp. 148-168.​

• Closed adoptions – where birth and adoption records are legally sealed to obscure adoptees’ biological parentage – were once the norm in many western Anglophone countries. Grassroots resistance to closed adoption relied upon the belief that deprivation of knowledge of their true biological origins could lead to psychological trauma among adoptees. In this chapter, I reflect on my own mother’s sense of deprivation as a resullt of closed adoption, her desire for a coherent origin story and her consequent process of cobbling together disparate fragments of legally-, religiously-, scientifically-, commercially- and familiarly-authorised and -authorising heritages from among diverse analogue, digital and biotechnical resources rendered intelligible, relevant and truthful by societal and (bio)technological transformations over time. In so doing, I call attention to complicated power relations in everyday personal heritage practices that challenge the simplistic pitting of ‘heritage from below’ (Robertson 2012) against ‘Authorised Heritage Discourse’ (AHD) (Smith 2006).​

Ormond, M. (2018) ‘Heritage from below’, Hiraeth Podcast, July, Amsterdam.

• In the Hiraeth podcast episode, I address the concept of 'heritage from below'. I do this by discussing my own complicated sense of personal heritage, linked to my two passport countries (the U.S. and Portugal) as well as the Netherlands (my current home) and other countries that have touched my life. My identity has been shaped by both my own travels around the world and my family history, which includes my mother’s search for her birth parents on two continents. ​

Ormond, M. (2018) 'Travel and hospitality as political acts', Medium, August.​

• What responsibility do we have to recognise and respect (seemingly) distant others? This is a personal story about the significance of both intra- and inter-national travel and migration in the ways I came to make sense of my relationship with the people and places of my youth in a small town in the United States.​

Ormond, M. (2018) 'This place, that place and another', Medium, August.

• What conditions must be satisfied for someone able to claim a national identity? This is a personal story exploring my shifting relationship with my second passport country, Portugal, after I left the country. Do I still have the right to claim Portuguese-ness? Did I ever?​

Ong, C.E., Ormond, M., and Sulianti, D. (2017) 'Performing "Chinese-ness" in Singkawang: Diasporic moorings, festivals and tourism', Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 58(1), 41-56. https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12149​

• Through an examination of two festivals – Qing Ming and Cap Go Meh – in the town of Singkawang in Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), we show how Singkawang-bound Chinese Indonesian tourists and their Singkawang-based relatives produce a diasporic heritage network through ‘moorings’ generated by both transnational and internal migration. Instead of returning to a singular ‘homeland’ in distant China, these tourists return to Chinese-majority Singkawang as a result of their personal genealogical roots and of their broader cultural allegiance with a kind of Chinese-ness that Singkawang has come to represent within a post-Suharto Indonesia. Through these two festivals, we demonstrate how personal heritage practices like ‘roots tourism’ and visiting friends and relatives (VFR) are intimately bound up with identity and developmental politics at local, national and international scales. In so doing, we identify a range of ways in which migratory and tourism flows by Chinese Indonesian internal migrants shape relations to their ancestral hometowns and cultural ‘homelands’ in Indonesia within the context of membership to and participation in a broader transnational diaspora.​

Expatriate Archive Centre, board member (2016-21)

Fonseca, M.L. and Ormond, M. (2008) ‘Defining “family” and bringing it together: the ins and outs of family reunification in Portugal’, in R. Grillo (ed.), The Family in Question: Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Multicultural Europe, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 89-112.​

• Book abstract: The family lives of immigrants and ethnic minority populations have become central to arguments about the right and wrong ways of living in multicultural societies. While the characteristic cultural practices of such families have long been scrutinized by the media and policy makers, these groups themselves are beginning to reflect on how to manage their family relationships. Exploring case studies from Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Australia, The Family in Question explores how those in public policy often dangerously reflect the popular imagination, rather than recognizing the complex changes taking place within the global immigrant community.​

Fonseca, M.L., Ormond, M., Malheiros, J.M., Patrício, M. and Martins, F. (2005) Reunificação familiar e imigração em Portugal [Family Reunification and Immigration in Portugal], Lisbon: ACIME.​

• 'Reunificação familiar e imigração em Portugal' ('Family reunification and immigration in Portugal') provides a framework of the phenomenon of family reunification and the integration of immigrants in host societies, by examining the experiences of countries with a deeper tradition of immigration than Portugal, such as North-western European countries and the United States. It also comprises an overview of Portugal’s experience with immigration, based on information available from official statistical sources, an appendix with a comparative table that summarises selected European Union member-states’ national legislation on family reunification, as well as an analysis comparing the Portuguese legislation with the EU Directive relative to family reunification (Directive 2003/86/CE). Taking into account the general lack of data and the limitations of the data that does exist, a survey was performed on a sample of non-EU citizens living in Portugal representative of the largest immigration populations or of populations that, despite currently being small, have displayed significant growth potential. In order to evaluate the potential to receive immigrant families at the regional level, case studies were conducted in a variety of districts across the country based upon interviews and focus groups with immigrants, socio-cultural institutions, NGOs and other relevant local actors from both public and private sectors.​

Ormond, M. (2002) ‘Mapping Minority Media: The National Context—Belgium’, Diasporic Minorities and their Media in the EU: A Mapping, Media@LSE, London School of Economics.​