This post is part of the blog series titled Visions for migration, published by the Standing Committee Reflexivities in Migration Studies (SC REFLEX), and edited by Sorina Carstea, Iva Dodevska, Stefan Manser-Egli and Anna-Lisa Müller. The series discusses the 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? Find the introduction to the series here.
Author: SIMONA SOKOLOVSKA
Feminist Visions for Migration Studies: Insights from My Lived Experience
Migration has shaped my life long before it shaped my research. I was born in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. I grew up in newly independent Macedonia, and now I live and work in Spain. Coming from a multilingual, post-Yugoslav context, I hear “home” and “belonging” less as fixed places than as ongoing practices. For me, home has always been something made and remade through language, paperwork, memory, relationships, and the daily work of b
elonging. Living this myself has changed how I hear public debate, where migration is too often framed as a threat to control rather than a lived reality to understand.
My research is not only about describing social realities. It is about refusing the narratives that make certain lives seem smaller, less legitimate, or less worthy of care.
Two projects, one question that keeps returning
My work currently unfolds through two connected projects. The first is my postdoctoral comparative research on the empowerment of South Asian migrant women in West Yorkshire (UK) and the Basque Country (Spain). I use life histories (extended biographical interviews across key life events) and participatory visual methods (photographs as starting points for conversation and everyday objects as ways into memory and belonging). Together, they help me explore how women negotiate identity, belonging, and agency through memory, felt emotions and creative self-expression. The second is a planned project with Fundación Vicente Ferrer on the long-term impact of maternal migration on children in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. It focuses on family dynamics, emotional remittances, and parenting strategies, especially what happens during separation and after mothers return.
At first glance, these may look like separate topics. One focuses on empowerment narratives in Europe, the other on transnational family life in South and Southeast Asia. But I see them as part of the same political and ethical question. What becomes invisible when migrant lives are reduced to administrative categories? What dimensions of lived experience disappear when only what can be measured is treated as real?
How I Learnt to Listen for Empowerment
I don’t see empowerment as something an individual reaches alone. In my experience, it takes shape in the spaces of negotiation, obligation, and care. It forms in the tension between agency and constraint: between what a woman wants, what she is permitted to want, what she can risk, and what she must do to survive. Starting from this position changes how I listen. If I only listen for the “big” markers of empowerment, such as employment, language acquisition, formal participation, I risk missing the quieter forms of agency. In my research, empowerment often appears in what looks small: gestures of care, moments of self-definition, subtle acts of negotiation, and the everyday work of making home in a place that may not fully welcome you.
For that reason, I draw on life histories and participatory methods. They create space for women to define the rhythm and meaning of their narratives, rather than forcing their experiences into the categories that institutions find most comfortable. For me, working this way is a decolonial commitment. To treat women’s interpretations as knowledge in their own right, rather than raw material to be translated into categories designed elsewhere. In my book project, women contribute photographs and handwritten words in their own languages, and the work is designed to circulate beyond the academy through a public-facing exhibition. For me, it’s a methodological and political choice. Migrant women are not passive subjects. They are interpreters of their own life.
The Fundación Vicente Ferrer project asks an uncomfortable question. What happens when maternal migration is treated as a development strategy, while its social costs are dismissed as “private family matters”? Remittances matter. They can provide essential financial stability, fund education, and expand opportunities. But if money becomes the main indicator of success, we risk turning family life into an accounting exercise and ignoring what cannot be sent back home.
I use emotional remittances to describe the love, reassurance, guilt, longing, discipline, and care that circulate through phone calls, voice notes, video chats, and the stories families tell themselves in order to survive separation. When mothers return, the hardest part is not always economic reintegration. It can be relational or renegotiating authority, rebuilding intimacy, and re-learning each other’s daily lives. This is why the study focuses specifically on mothers who have returned from labour migration, their children, and the caregivers who held families together during the mother’s absence.
Seen this way, the issue is structural, not individual. These are not simply “personal” problems. They are produced by global labour markets that demand care workers, migration regimes that separate families, and national narratives that celebrate overseas workers while underfunding child-centred support.
The society with migration I’m arguing for
I want a world where migration is not framed as a problem, a threat, or a permanent “crisis”. I am arguing for societies that recognise themselves as shaped by migration, where mobility is treated as a fact of social life and where rights and belonging do not depend on how “deserving”, “integrated”, or economically productive you appear. That means moving public debate away from sorting people into deserving and undeserving categories at the border and towards dignity. It also means centring care, not as a private burden placed on women, but as essential social support. Migration systems rely on care every day, yet the people who sustain them remain structurally unprotected.
If I could help shape the field, I would start by changing how we speak about migrants. Too often, our writing slips into labels such as “low-skilled”, “dependent”, “integrated”, or “irregular”, as if people’s lives can be captured through administrative categories. When we do that, we reproduce a world where migrants become objects to be sorted rather than political subjects in their own right. My work insists on a different starting point. It centres migrant women as interpreters of their own lives, with visions, contradictions, humour, grief, and agency.
I keep returning to everyday life, because that’s where migration actually happens. Not in policy documents, but in conversations, expectations, and long-distance calls. It shows up in who feels able to speak, who is judged as a “good” mother, who carries the hidden labour at home, and who is expected to adapt constantly. Paying attention to these moments changes what we see. It makes visible both the weight people carry and the ways they make room for themselves.
Finally, I would argue for a broader understanding of impact. Impact should not be reduced to policy influence alone. It can also mean cultural change, public recognition, and supporting organisations doing grounded work with transnational families. In the maternal migration project, the aim is not only to document harm. It is to generate knowledge that strengthens child-centred services, reduces stigma around migrating mothers, and treats children’s emotional worlds as politically significant.
Reflexivity as responsibility
It’s easy to name my background and stop there. I’m aware that my position shapes what I notice, what I ask, and how I interpret what I hear. What matters is what I do with that awareness. How it affects my relationships in the field, the power dynamics in the room, and the choices I make when I turn lived experiences into research. For me, responsibility involves two deliberate choices. I refuse to romanticise resilience in ways that excuse a lack of support. I also refuse to frame migrant lives through a single storyline of suffering. Migrant lives include desire, happiness, beauty, ambition, conflict, and creativity. My job is not to tidy that complexity into “neat” results. It is to create research spaces where complexity remains visible and where participants’ meaning-making counts as knowledge.
The world I’m writing towards
When I think about why this research matters, I come back to one simple point. I hold on to Arundhati Roy’s words when I need to name what I’m working towards: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”.
I want a world where people do not have to prove they deserve rights, where mothers do not have to leave their children in order to secure their futures, where care is not exported as sacrifice, where belonging is not conditional, and where migration is not a synonym for suspicion. I also want a field of migration studies that does not hide behind neutrality when neutrality benefits the powerful. The question is not whether our work is political. It is whose politics it serves.
Bio: Simona Sokolovska is am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain. Drawing on feminist and decolonial perspectives, my research examines how mobility, care, and belonging intersect across borders and within everyday life.