We are happy to announce that the Standing Committee Reflexivities in Migration Studies (SC REFLEX) is launching a new blog series titled Visions for migration. The editing team - Sorina Carstea, Iva Dodevska, Stefan Manser-Egli and Anna-Lisa Müller – curated a collection of powerful blog posts answering the burning question: how does who we are shape how we do migration research, and what kind of world do we hope our research can contribute towards?
We therefore asked migration scholars for very particular contributions: that is, to make explicit the political in their work, and to help us envision how we can enact social change through the work we do. This task is, in our view, simply non-negotiable in times when our research subject is at the center of a contested, unstable and increasingly violent societal transformation that unfolds before our eyes. The rising power of the far right and its implications to the rights of racialized and migranticized people (and other minorities); the crumbling of the international social order; the normalization of wars and genocide; environmental collapse; the delegitimation of the human rights framework; and a violent multiplication and reinforcement of borders fueled by unprecedented technological possibilities; this is the state of the world where our work as migration scholars is currently taking place. The themes that we study in Migration Studies – human mobility, displacement, citizenship and belonging, borders, racism and racial hierarchies, and societal diversity – are at the center of it all.
In spite of this obvious fact, the field, while growing exponentially in the past two decades, has remained astonishingly quiet on this interlinkage between our research work and the social reality within which it unfolds. Despite the recognition that migration research in many countries developed – and remains – in close collaboration with policy priorities, the dominant conviction has been that our task is to decipher a social phenomenon, as if we were outside of it. Even when our research is strongly shaped by governmental agendas, and even when it is the burning political question of our times, the tendency has been to see what we do as providing expert insight – impartial, neutral, and purely fact-based evidence – to inform better policies. Positivist paradigms are partly to blame for this state of affairs, as are dependence on governmental funding, and perhaps, too, a quiet hesitancy to take a normative stance on an issue that is seen as too polarizing or, worse, political.
But what we (migration researchers) have in fact been doing this whole time is take direct part in a very political and very normative public debate, one that has direct implications in shaping the lives of people on the move and racialized and minoritized populations, but also in re-defining our societies more broadly. We have done this not from a “view from nowhere”, but from our very particular personal positions – whether privileged or not, from the Global South or the Global North, whether as white allies or as racialized bodies, whether as people displaced or as people witnessing displacement. This long resisted idea is actually based on a rather simple and self-evident notion: that what we do and how we do it is profoundly shaped and limited by who we are and the experiences we had.
If the decolonial, indigenous and feminist awareness of situated knowledges took a while to reach Migration Studies, broadly speaking, our Standing Committee was established to strengthen this awareness within IMISCOE and beyond. The SC REFLEX was founded precisely to draw attention to the link between knowledge and power, to re-examine the ways we produce knowledge on “migration” and “migrants” and understand the implications of our work on the political reality we are embedded in and that we contribute to. Debates at IMISCOE now increasingly focus on topics like “decentering knowledge” (Annual Conference 2025) and the “reflexive turn” Annual Conference 2024). Migration scholars now know that the categories that we use are not neutral descriptors but tools that produce and maintain intersectional social hierarchies. The “reflexive turn” made explicit how methodological nationalism and colonial legacies have shaped what counts as “migration”. And while, in light of this, few migration scholars would refute the normativity of our work and the importance of our positionalities in interpreting the social world, we remain curiously cautious to link this awareness with our vision for the otherwise. A vision not only for how the field should look like – a research field that is not only rigorous but truly transformative, rooted in social justice, and of benefit also to those we study – but also how a world of/with “migration” should look like; a world shaped by human mobility and societal diversity.
Before we turn to our series, let us acknowledge the excellent visionary work already done in and beyond Migration Studies: from disruptive research paradigms such as the transnational lens (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1993; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), the mobility turn (Urry 2007; Cresswell 2010) and de-migranticization (Dahinden 2016), to outright political projects such as post-national citizenship (Soysal 1994; Bauböck 2018), conviviality (Gilroy 2004; Valluvan 2016; Meissner and Heil 2021), borders abolitionism (Anderson, Sharma and Wright 2011), open borders (Carens 2013; Sager 2020) and freedom to move (Somin 2020). Yet in this era of far right rhetoric and dystopic politics, we feel it is more pressing than ever to stir collective imagination on (alternative) narratives and visions in and for migration (studies).
We therefore invited migration scholars to reflect on this question, and to tell us how they shape their research to contribute towards what they see as a desirable world and future shaped by human mobility.
The question struck a cord – we received more than 60 blog proposals – and overwhelmingly so among researchers who are most personally affected by “migration”: people of color, people on the move, people displaced. This is a good thing, as one of our SC aims is to give more platform to voices that are underrepresented in the knowledge apparatus in which migration research is situated. At the same time, it’s disconcerting, because it suggests that the massive burden of transforming social research and the labour of imagining alternative societal futures is left to be borne by racialized and migranticized scholars. Once again, it seems as though non-migranticized, white, Western researchers – as “universal subjects” doing research from a “view from nowhere” – are exempt from the duty to reflect on positionality, normativity, and alternative futures; and thus from the duty to make this world a better place for all.
Admittedly, we asked a very difficult question. It is not easy to articulate “a vision” of an alternative epistemology, let alone an alternative social reality. But people delivered, and convincingly so, in our view. We think that this blog series is a good (more widely accessible and more digestible) format to stir debate on what kind of world we hope our research will contribute towards. We will publish one contribution to the series each week and hope that this series of contributions will inspire others and more migration scholars to reflect upon it and formulate an answer - for themselves as migration scholars and for the field of migration studies.
We would like to wholeheartedly thank all authors - including those who were not selected - for taking the time to think with us on these pressing questions, and for sharing their personal stories.
The posts will appear in the Blogs section.
The SC Reflexivities working group on Visions:
More about SC Reflexivities in Migration Studies
