TAMIU Faculty Member Dr. Soto-Vasquez Part of New Book Exploring ‘Migrant World Making’
A Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) faculty member is part of a team of authors contributing to an innovative book exploring how migrants develop communication strategies in host countries to forge social connections, navigate assimilation, and maintain links to their originating cultures.
Migrant World Making (Michigan State University Press, December 2023) is edited by Sergio Fernando Juárez of Loyola Marymount University with contributing authors assistant professor of Communication Dr. Arthur D. Soto-Vasquez (TAMIU); Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, (Colorado State University), and Michael Lechuga, (University of New Mexico).
Migrant World Making explores the migrants’ process of constructing a home place by creating a network of communication tools and strategies to connect with multiple communities. As being a migrant differs from person to person, the edited collection’s authors showcase numerous practices migrants adopt to communicate and connect with others as they forge identities in globalized yet highly nationalistic societies.
With varying aspirations and motives for seeking new homes, migrants build communities by telling stories, engaging in social media activism, protesting, writing scholarly criticism, and using multiple modes of communication. To match this variety, the book’s authors use a wide array of rhetorical, cultural, and communication methodologies and philosophies to describe what the experience of migration means to those who have lived it.
"This book is the culmination of four years of work among my three other editors, the chapter authors, and myself," said Dr. Soto-Vasquez, "We are so proud that we get to share a vision of the ways migrants use media, technology, communication, and storytelling to create homelands."
Dr. Soto-Vásquez, joined the TAMIU faculty in 2018. He earned his Ph.D. in Communication at American University. His MA in Media Studies was received at The University of Texas at Austin in 2015 and his BA in Political Science at St. Edward's University.
His research area is political communication and digital media studies. A member of the National Communication Association (NCA) and International Communication Association, he has been a summer Fellow at American University, School of Communication. He was a 2022-2023 Affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina and was the recipient of a Top Paper Award at the 2021 NCA in the Theater, Film, and New Media Division.
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