ECPR Joint Session of Workshops, 7-10 April 2026, University of Innsbruck
Deadline for paper proposals: 10 December 2025
Workshop Directors: Verena Wisthaler (Eurac Research), Miriam Haselbacher (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Giorgia Zogu (University of Vienna)
Workshop Theme:
Non-urban or peripheral spaces, whether defined geographically, economically, socially or politically, are increasingly recognized as important sites of migration governance: power is negotiated, authority contested, and state presence unevenly felt. Diverse forms of migration, including asylum, labour, and internal mobility, have reshaped non-urban spaces across Europe and beyond, transforming them into spaces of arrival and transit but also sites where struggles over resources and policy implementation unfold. This workshop brings together scholars who explore how governance and politics unfold in diverse non-urban spaces, reflecting on broader center–periphery cleavages, debates over sovereignty, humanitarianism, and the governance of mobility.
This workshop examines how diverse non-urban and peripheral settings intersect with different forms of mobility, including refugee migration, labor migration and internal movement. Focusing on the actors, politics and governance at play, the workshop investigates migration politics and governance within complex multi-level systems outside the urban realm.
We seek
- Qualitative and quantitative as well as theoretical papers on non-urban spaces and migration.
- Papers exploring the experiences of migrants in non-urban settings, focusing on obstacles and advantages.
- Papers theorising or empirically exploring core-periphery relations in migration research.
- Papers exploring various dimension of non-urbanity, such as remoteness, borderlands, rurality etc.
- Papers unpacking space-making as process, its problems and opportunities in relation to migration.
- Papers reflecting on actors and their role in migration governance and space-making.
- Papers examining how processes of peripheralisation are addressed in relation to migration politics.
The workshop lays the groundwork for a joint publication.
More detailed information: https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/WorkshopDetails/16778