Exploring Equitable Research Partnerships across Africa and Europe
This session places the Africa-European dialogue at its centre, inviting scholars, practitioners, and community-based researchers to rethink how migration research is conceptualised, conducted, and shared across Africa and Europe. Although recent years have seen growing recognition of inequities within migration studies (Raghuram and Sondhi 2026), significant power imbalances continue to shape collaborations among Global South researchers (Mkwananzi and Cin, 2020), migrant communities, and institutions situated outside dominant academic spaces (BEAP Team, 2026). This session calls for a deeper engagement with what it means to build and sustain equitable partnerships within African-European research contexts.
A key aim of the session is to examine how equitable partnership models claim to address structural inequalities, mitigate power asymmetries, and challenge ideological or cultural biases embedded in mainstream knowledge production but often fall short of achieving this. What are the stated aims around equitable partnership and what are the structural limits to achieving this?
Towards this, the session aims to open up the space to address the practical dimensions of building equitable partnerships, including funding arrangements, due diligence processes, fair co-authorship practices, and institutional barriers, such as ethics and compliance systems. Through concrete examples, we encourage participants to explore how to shift from viewing research communities as stakeholders to recognising them as rightsholders with voice and agency across all stages of research. We also aim to think through ways in which Global South actors can shape governance structures, set partnership terms, and propose alternative models of collaboration rooted in local epistemologies.
We welcome presentations that offer open and honest reflections on the following:
- Have you had any experience of setting the research agenda in consultation with those involved in the research? How do you think this can be incorporated into future migration research?
- How did the groups being researched directly benefit from the research, i.e. how did research lead to the wellbeing of those who are researched?
- What vectors of internal inequalities within the global South did your projects address or mitigate and how?
- How were African partners involved in project leadership and how can that space be enlarged in migration research?
- How have researchers experimented with redistributing decision-making power in projects and how have they strengthened African institutional leadership through their projects?
- How did European scholars benefit from research in and on Africa?
- When should we not speak about or do research in and on Africa? What should be the limits of European scholarship in Africa?
Ultimately, the session aims to provoke a conversation about the limits to claims around decolonisation and equitable partnership (Raghuram & Sondhi, 2026), but also to move us towards the possibilities of actually achieving this.
Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by 13th February, 2026 to
Organised by: Parvati Raghuram (The Open University), Gunjan Sondhi (The Open University) and Markus Breines (FAFO)
References
BEAP Team. 2026. ‘Equitable Research Partnerships Are No Longer Optional – Here’s How to Make Them a Reality’. Times Higher Education Campus, February 2. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/equitable-research-partnerships-are-no-longer-optional-heres-how-make-them-reality.
Mkwananzi, Faith, and Melis Cin. 2020. ‘What Does a Decolonised Research Culture Look Like?’ Research Professional News, June 26. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-political-science-blog-2020-6-what-does-a-decolonised-research-culture-look-like/.
Raghuram, Parvati, and Gunjan Sondhi. 2026. ‘Decolonising This, Decolonising That: Beyond Rhetorical Decolonisation in Migration Studies’. In Reflexivities and Knowledge Production in Migration Studies, edited by Janine Dahinden and Andreas Pott. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-03337-6_6.