In this book we argue that there is a need to understand translocality in other
spaces, places and scales beyond the national. Thus we are interested in translocal
geographies as a simultaneous situatedness across different locales which provide
ways of understanding the overlapping place-time(s) in migrants’ everyday
lives. As our starting point then, we understand translocality as ‘groundedness’
during movement, including those everyday movements that are not necessarily
transnational. We call these translocal geographies because we take a view that
these spaces and places need to be examined both through their situatedness and
their connectedness to a variety of other locales. And in doing so, we open up ways
of examining migration not only across other spaces and scales such as rural-urban,
inter-urban and inter-regional but also bringing into view the movements of those
supposedly ‘immobile’ groups who do not fall under the rubric of a transnational
migrant but who negotiate different kinds of local-local journeys (both real and
imagined). By grounding translocality within different scales and locales then, we
are able to examine translocality beyond a notion of ‘grounded’ transnationalism
(we will come back to this issue later in this chapter).