Call for Papers "Decentring and Recentring: Changing Agendas and Practices of Migration Studies"
IMISCOE Annual Conference "Decentering Migration Studies" Paris–Aubervilliers, July 1-4, 2025
Panel organisers:
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Gunjan Sondhi, The Open University UK,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. -
Parvati Raghuram, The Open University UK,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. -
Markus Roos Breines, Fafo Norway,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
IMISCOE has, over the past decade, gradually shifted attention to migration beyond Europe and adopted the language of decolonisation and decentring. Migrations unrelated to Europe are large in scale and impact gender relations, class hierarchies, and a wide range of other dimensions of people’s lives. The research and funding agendas that shape migration studies, however, continue to be orientated around the global North and its demands. Recognising the limits of theorising from the North, a number of scholars have tried to explore what theory from the South might look like and critiqued the racial and ethnic hierarchies that migration studies sometimes builds upon. These are important steps, but it remains unclear how we can move beyond critique to revision a recentred world. With the global North as both the explicit and implicit centre of migration studies, this panel takes a step back and asks how we can actually decentre and how do we open up spaces to discuss the problems of colonisation and centring in places beyond Europe. This panel explores the difficulties of decentring migration studies in the global North by asking:
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What are the conceptual, methodological and ethical issues faced while trying to decentre? -
How do we transcend global North models of development and citizenship to make sense of migration processes, policies and practices?
Together, two panels will explore decentring and re-centring migration studies. The first panel explores what decentring might entail in migration studies if it does not centre the global North and the second panel turns attention to different ways of doing migration studies by recentring it beyond Europe.
We invite artists, performers, activists, community workers and scholars to contribute by considering the following questions, but not limited to:
- What is actually being decentred?
- What are the types of decentring that people have practised and why is this decentring?
- What methods for decentring have been deployed?
- What are the challenges of decentring from the global North?
- How do you decentre academia itself?
- How can the reproduction of epistemic colonialism be avoided?
- What does recentring look like?
- What are needs and demands of recentring?
- Who does recentring?
- From where can recentring take place?
- In what ways can migration studies be recentred?
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit a 200-word abstract to