Are you a PhD candidate or early career researcher that works on developing, critiquing, or renewing migration research methods? Or do you have a recent experience doing migration research that highlights challenges or benefits of certain methods and approaches? Then this call is for you!
For the IMISCOE PhD Network's Blog Special Issue, we are seeking contributions from migration scholars across disciplinary boundaries under 3 thematic areas - decolonising methods, online methods, and creative practices! The contributions for every section can be texts, video essays, audio essays, or art-based research from early career scholars, activists, artists, or educators.
Submit a short abstract of 150 words (under any of the three thematic areas) to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 1st March 2022. For those selected to write a blog post, the contribution not exceeding 800 words is expected by 1st of May, 2022.
Decolonising methods
Post- and decolonial perspectives focus on studying how subaltern voices have been deliberately removed from our spectrum of knowledge since late modernity. In migration studies, most epistemologies and methodologies employed are embedded in the actual migration governance and its colonial legacy. However, certain methodologies focus on the voices of migrants, refugees, and displaced people per se, thus contributing to stressing and de-centering hegemoni cperspectives. Participatory methods, methods that acknowledge and enhance (the researcher’s) subjectivity and (self) reflexivity, methods that navigate ethical concerns in building relationships based on mutual trust and care, or methods that acknowledge the researcher's positionality, are in this line.
This section welcomes contributions reflecting on such approaches that, potentially - but no tnecessarily - crisscross genre, race, class, religion, or sexual orientation perspectives.
Online methods
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,ongoing research and fieldwork plans have undergone considerable change. Migration researchers have turned to differen t technology platforms to collect their data and to gain access to larger and more diverse participant populations. Many have made interesting and innovative pivots in their research plans and created more participatory and ethical research.
To gain insight into the underlying challenges that researchers have been facing, this section welcomes blogs from researchers who have had to face such pivots in their work. The articles could focus on the strengths and limitations of online research methods, different online environment and technology platforms in conducting research in migration studies during the lockdown, ethical and data protection dilemmas, and questions of access.
Creative practices
Creative practices, such as art, literature, music, theater, audio-visual media etc., have been increasingly employed either as methods or as research topics to explore and understand migration. Employing creative practices as tools can enable better understanding of individually lived migration experiences, challenging established representations of migration and amplifying migrant agency and advocacy.
On the other hand, focusing on creative practices as research topics enables the researcher to understand how migration affects different settings and everyday cultural practices and how migrants actively enrich the places where they find themselves living. Moreover one can understand how creative practices enable migrants to process and make sense of their migration experience.
This section welcomes contributions reflecting on or exploring creative practices employed as methods, or the methods used to research creative practices of migrants.
