We sat with Ingrid Ríos and Sebastián Umpierrez to discuss the migration research in Casa Grande University, the first IMISCOE Member Institute in Latin America.
Can you tell us a few words about your institute?
Casa Grande University (UCG) is a private university located in Guayaquil, Ecuador. UCG is accredited within the Ecuadorian Higher Education System as a social science and humanities tertiary education institution. Its mission is to educate ethical and socially responsible, proactive, innovative, and reflective individuals with research competencies, engaging their professional skills with societal development. UCG is strongly committed to generating new pathways of knowledge, foster an inclusive, intercultural, diverse and gender-balanced learning environment. As of 2024, UCG’s academic comprises seventeen undergraduate majors, six technologies and four graduate programs. All of them adapted to today’s challenges with in-person and online teaching and learning modalities.
What about the type of migration research that you are conducting at UCG?
Thanks to our rich academic offer, UCG contributes in several ways to research in migration studies and to public debates related to migration. We collaborate with local, national and international civil society organizations, as well as with other research centers to foster scientific production and knowledge exchanges regarding migration in and from the Global South. Integrated into different research lines, we have four major research projects on migration at UCG. In the research line ‘Democracy, Participation and Representation’, two research projects have been developed over the past three years. The first one is entitled Immigration of Venezuelans in Guayaquil: Migratory profile, labor market and remittances. In its first phase, the project aimed to analyze Venezuelan immigration in Guayaquil looking at migration profiles, labor market and remittances. In the second phase, the goal was to explore the motivational dimensions behind the Venezuelan migration in the city of Guayaquil, migrants’ working modalities, and their socio-economic well-being. The second project Examining elections from a transnational perspective. Discourses, strategies and preferences of Latin American voters, candidates and political parties looked at similarities and differences between the national and transnational arenas of participation in terms of discourses, strategies and preferences, mostly in Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Chile. In the research line ‘Education and Society’, we developed since 2020 a research project that explores the topic of schooling of Venezuelans in Guayaquil, fusing integration and resocialization theories. The project is entitled From right to practice. Exploratory study of the experiences of school education of boys, girls, adolescents, their Venezuelan migrant families and teachers in Guayaquil. Finally, within the research line ‘Cultures, Aesthetics and Communication in the Media Convergence’, we are developing a more socially-oriented project entitled La Vereda (the Corner), which serves as a community digital media outlet run by members of migrant communities and UCG students.
How do you see your role in the IMISCOE community?
UCG scholars have been actively engaged in IMISCOE for quite a while now. As a new institutional member, we are strongly motivated to continue contributing to the scholarly exchanges taking place in the Network. UCG has also been continuously working with different target groups within and beyond academic networks to produce knowledge on migration and foster knowledge circulation. As part of its mission to be socially responsible, the university has a long-lasting experience in collaborating with local governments’ policymakers, civil society actors and other educational institutions. As a new member of IMISCOE and to help shaping a future agenda, we wish to create an observatory of human mobility that can centralize all the previous UCG efforts into a single division, while motivating scholars and students to continue contributing to the field of migration studies in collaboration with our IMISCOE colleagues from different parts of the world.