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: MARIIA TISHENINA
Migration scholarship remains obscured by the neglect of non-events: immobility, abandoned relocation and study-abroad ideas, and futures that never materialise or are never even envisioned. We study those who move. We study, sometimes, those who want to move but cannot. We rarely study those for whom the question of movement never arises, for it was never asked, either by them or of them.
This omission is not just an empirical gap. It is an ontological and epistemological opening. Conventional research frequently assumes that only what is already knowable can be researched. The result is a subtle circularity. What we lack concepts to see, we struggle to treat as real, and what we do not treat as real, we struggle to research.
In my doctoral study, which examined the study-abroad aspirations of Russian students and how these are shaped by virtual student mobility experiences, these struggles became particularly salient. Conducted at a time when Covid-19 mobility restrictions were being lifted while new structural constraints were emerging with the unfolding Russia–Ukraine military conflict, the research forced a high degree of epistemological reflexivity. I was myself a mobile student pursuing a PhD in the UK whose own considerations and concerns closely echoed those of the participants, and, coming from a highly positivist scholarly background, I had to confront whether to treat this resonance as a hindrance or a resource.
The resulting internal struggle led me to recognise my own deeply ingrained mobility bias within a field where educational mobility is positioned as a rarely contested good. Equally, it allowed me to understand that the focus of my inquiry is not mobility but immobility – the absence of cross-border movement produced by multi-level absences of a deeper nature.
A Stratified Epistemology of Absence
I propose a vision for migration studies that treats absence not as a void, but as a real, active force. With this critical realist stance, I put forward a stratified epistemology of absence to recognise that absence becomes knowable in different ways across different strata: the empirical (observable actions), the actual (partially observable considerations), and the real (where aspirations take shape, intertwined with existing opportunity structures and capabilities). This focus on absence aligns with recent sociological work arguing that empirical inquiry is often governed by a presence bias, while suggesting that absences actively pattern what becomes possible, sayable, and doable in social settings.
Recognising this is a profoundly political claim. If absence is real and influential, then the forces producing it are forces of exclusion that demand our scrutiny. Distinguishing between aspiring to migrate and being able to do so is a key issue in contemporary migration studies. Yet to study only movement is to study only those whom the system has already served or failed to serve, rendering invisible those for whom mobility never becomes conceivable. To study solely motivations, barriers, and enablers is to implicitly assume that mobility is—and therefore should be—universally coveted. The world I want to see is one where our scholarship does not replicate these omissions and symbolic pressures.
How Aspirations Form
To explain how mobility becomes unthinkable, we need an account of how aspirations form and fail to form. My research suggests that aspirations are neither strictly rational choices nor the simple result of structural determinism. Consequently, cleanly delineating them, even analytically, from ability (particularly revealed ability) or capabilities is problematic.
Rather, aspirations are emergent properties arising from the interplay between the process of absorbing the societal expectations and unspoken rules, and the resulting semi-private socio-cultural worldview developed through personal encounters. This interplay allows individuals, through the causal powers of humans as temporally embedded beings, to first conceive of a variety of possible futures and then deliberate upon them.
It is within this subjective, yet relationally constituted worldview that the seeds of any aspiration, including those divergent from collective norms, either take root or find no soil. Importantly, if the aspiration to migrate or study abroad is absent, that absence is not a void. It is part of a unique, deeply personal mix of local attachments and alternative futures occupying the space where mobility might otherwise have become thinkable. In this light, staying is not necessarily a choice not to move, just as moving does not automatically equate to the expression of one’s agency.
The Methodological Challenge
Methodologically, this has immediate consequences. Much qualitative work on cross-border movement relies on interviews with those who have already decided to move, are moving, or have moved. While understandable, this approach is vulnerable to producing accounts that are post hoc reconstructions of action, especially when mobility is already discursively celebrated.
From a critical realist standpoint, surveys and questionnaires are similarly stripped of their taken-for-granted objectivity. The very words used in surveys – asking about ‘aspirations’, ‘desires’, ‘intentions’, or ‘serious considerations’ – are loaded. Often used interchangeably, they risk importing researchers’ own normative assumptions, forcing participants to respond to universalist ideas of mobility that they may never have authentically held. Therefore, instead of capturing the reality of decision-making, surveys may produce and record the reproduction of generic collective-level sentiments and hypothetical thinking.
Under this view, research does not become impossible. Rather, it demands careful design and transparency regarding the onto-epistemological stances underpinning both qualitative and quantitative inquiry. It requires taking epistemic reflexivity seriously and treating research encounters as open systems rather than closed ones.
Redefining Freedom in Migration Studies
If absences are consequential, then what needs explanation is not merely why some people do not move, but how some people come to inhabit worlds in which mobility never enters the horizon of conceivable action. This is a more fundamental question. It shifts the analytical focus from observable decisions and partly observable contemplations to the prior conditions that make certain futures imaginable or unimaginable as realistic for individual social actors.
The intervention I propose follows directly from this shift. Our normative framework must centre authentic decision-making, which requires problematising acquiescence to social pressure in both directions. Acquiescent immobility is a condition in which staying is not a genuine decision, but the product of never meaningfully encountering alternatives. Acquiescent mobility, its mirror image, is a condition in which moving is not a genuine decision either, but the product of a social imaginary that renders staying a form of failure or stagnation. Neither constitutes freedom. Both are forms of unfreedom that current scholarship is structurally ill-equipped to detect and explain.
The core insistence is that migration research must attend to what is absent and how this absence is stratified as rigorously as it attends to what is present. A normative stance that privileges either movement or sedentarism, even when framed as opportunity or empowerment, risks becoming another form of symbolic domination. It prescribes what people should aspire to rather than ensuring the conditions under which they can freely decide for themselves which ends to pursue.
Under the principle of agency freedom, the critical realist vision of migration studies I hold is that of an interdisciplinary field committed to understanding and extending:
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The agential ‘freedom to choose’ either mobility or immobility.
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The structural ‘freedom of choice’ that presents both movement and staying as equal affordances to be possibly and actually enacted.
Without attention to both, and to their circularly causal inter-relationality, scholarship risks reproducing existing, context-specific hierarchies of (im)mobility rather than attending to and expanding human agency beyond that of an abstraction.
Bio: Dr. Mariia Tishenina is an educational researcher affiliated with Edge Hill University (UK). She earned her PhD in Educational Research and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), with an MSc in Comparative and International Education from the University of Oxford and a PGCert in Teaching in Higher Education. Her research explores students’ subjectification and self-formation amid technological change, drawing on critical realism, mobility/immobility studies, educational aspirations, and agency freedom.