What happens when we all have different ideas and assumptions about who is “a migrant”?
In this wide-ranging conversation with Asya Pisarevskaya, Bridget Anderson talks about the powerful implications of imaginaries when it comes to who is considered an insider or an outsider – a “migrant” or a “national”. Bridget gives examples of how these figures are misleadingly constructed as opposites, and how race, class and others ways of experiencing the world, are ways of finding commonalities.
Bridget Anderson is the Director of the new Migrant Futures Institute (MFI) at Goldsmiths University in the UK. Before that, she was the Director of the Migration Mobility Bristol Research Center at University of Bristol.
In the episode, some of the research she mentions was done with the Horizon Europe Project “PRIME” (Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe): https://migrationpolicycentre.eu/protecting-irregular-migrants/
Further reading:
1. 2025 Rethinking Migration: Mobility, race and citizenship, (editor) Bristol: Bristol University Press. Open Access
2. 2013 Us and Them? The dangerous politics of immigration control Oxford: Oxford University Press (OUP)
3. 2024 ‘Blurred Boundaries: Fantasy citizenship, the worker citizen and mobility controls’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 50 (11): 2767-2781
4. 2019 New Directions in Migration Studies: towards methodological denationalism’ Comparative Migration Studies 7 (36) https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0140-8
Professor Bridget Anderson would like to thank Emma Newcombe, Emily Walmsley and Jo Crow for being such a fantastic team at Migration Mobility Bristol.