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: NORMA SCHEMSCHAT
My engagement with Queer and feminist frameworks emerged inductively through empirical work on migration in peripheralized places. It was the inadequacy of the frameworks dominating migration research that led me to them as analytical and normative resource for reflexively engaging with human mobility. In times of authoritarianism and competing narratives about how migration might, should or shouldn’t shape societies, when migranticized individuals are scapegoated and human mobility reduced to a policy or security issue, speculating about migration/futures creatively and hopefully, beyond linearity and progression, may challenge simplistic narratives and allow us to rethink how we conduct migration research altogether.
When starting my work on migration, futures, and how space shapes imaginaries around them, I returned to two observations: First, that thinking about futures was tainted by crisis. This may not be surprising given that uncertainty has become a companion of the everyday; yet it invites us to dwell on how crisis-talk prevents utopian thinking needed for meaningful (and radical) change. Second, that temporality shapes almost all aspects of social life. One temporal imaginary appeared to shape thinking more than others: linearity and progression. Working on migration, spatial inequalities and futures, I was conflicted studying movement, transformation, and the making of places while relying on analytical frameworks that risked reproducing the assumptions I hoped to challenge. How was my research contributing to foreclosing the futures of the places and people at its heart?
In this blog post, I think about how we – as researchers of migration and place – can engage with futures in ways that break from linearity and crisis, and look into other ways of thinking about migration and its futures that center hope, possibility, and radical imagining. For that, I turn to Queer and feminist geographies, and argue that they are not just useful but essential here.
Against spatio-temporal linearity
Migration is often narrated through seemingly planned (and with that predictable, managable) sequences: departure from place of origin, arrival at destination; progression via stages of settlement with eventual integration (or return) as a result. People on the move are assumed – and expected – to move along strictly defined timelines, processes and routes: from temporary to permanent residence, from unskilled to skilled, from cultural ‘Other’ to ‘integrated’ citizen, entering countries “officially” and following selected immigration corridors and procedures that rarely – if ever – allow for stepping sideways. In this script, any deviation may be illegalized. These narratives of linearity obscure the non-linear world and future-making that happens through migration: Navigating uncertain legal statuses, shifting labor markets, and maintaining transnational family ties rarely happen smoothly along predetermined paths; they demand improvisation and openness to ever-changing plans.
Assumptions about time, space and mobility underlie urban scholarship, too. Be it notions of arrival in inner cities and gradual out-migration to suburbs over time; the narrative of international migration as (‘crisis-induced’ and thus spontaneous) flows from the Global South to the Global North, or developmentalist rationales underlying urban growth and neighborhood change. These assumptions co-shape what future(s) are desirable, where these desirable futures are located, and who participates in them.
Such temporal and linear framings in urban and migration scholarship are not innocent: They politically position migration as a process with beginnings, middles, and ends, taking place in certain spaces, and inform ideas of migration as something that can (or should) be controlled. They reduce the complexity inherent in how mobility and space interplay: a refugee arriving in a ‘global’ city faces socio-spatial dynamics different from one arriving in a rural area, who experiences arrival differently from someone settling in a mid-sized town. In all these contexts, newcomers navigate competing temporal and mobility regimes.
What futures become envisionable when we attend to different ways of imagining futures across multiple settings: along alternative timelines, beyond ‘integration,’ ‘development’ and ‘progress’? Queer and feminist geographies offer valuable interventions for migration researchers on a quest to imagining future(s) and migration ‘Otherwise.’
Against the script
One of Queer theory’s powerful interventions is disrupting the idea of “straight time”: the assumption that life unfolds in predictable, linear sequences of birth, marriage, reproduction, parenthood, retirement, and death. Extending this through prevalent neoliberal assumptions of progress may add graduation and career to the timeline. Each stage is tied to rules and expectations, with notions of ‘progress’ that allow for little back and forth, detours, or doing things ‘Otherwise.’
This temporal script runs through migration research, too. However, migrants’ lived experiences rarely fit into its temporal logic: Think of a Syrian refugee who builds a home and career in Berlin only to face precarity caused by shifting asylum policies. Consider a Polish care worker in London whose planning involves saving to return home, investing in their children’s education in the UK, and imagining a third option they haven’t thought of yet. Think of a small town where an Afghan family may navigate an asylum procedure that determines their future while planning children’s educational trajectories, professional reorientation, maintaining transnational ties, and creating community. Imagine an undocumented migrant day labourer in agricultural industries in the US or Europe whose future-making occurs in small spaces they carve out for themselves while navigating in/formal regimes and their imposed temporalities marked by immediacy. Queer epistemologies warn that these experiences are neither failures of linear ‘progress,’ nor exceptions. They exemplify how time and space are culturally constructed, beautifully laid out by Jack Halberstam in Queer time and place; they also exemplify the making and remaking of futures in non-teleological ways, where setbacks and sideways movements are not deviations but constitutive of how life unfolds.
Rather than thinking about migration through the lens of a linear trajectories specific to ideal-type places, migration scholars should attend to the multiplicitous futures emerging under different temporal rhythms and regimes. Conducting migration research through the lens of Queer temporalities opens spaces for exploring migrant futures beyond predetermined endpoints, and for learning from the provisional and improvisational ways migrants actively resist temporal regimes that confine them to waiting, liminal status, or fixed trajectories.
Whose futures count?
From the perspective of receiving states, policymakers and planners, the future of migration is often about managing flows, predicting numbers, or optimizing integration outcomes. Migration scholarship can reproduce these epistemological hierarchies. Feminist geography insists knowledge production is situated, partial, and shaped by uneven power relations. It teaches migration scholars to understand space as relational and contested. The future, too, must be understood as negotiated among actors with unequal power to make their visions count. Asking how future(s) of migration are imagined, by who and with what consequences thus begs for feminist frameworks that oblige researchers to reflect on whose visions of the future are centered, and whose foreclosed. Centering feminist epistemologies shapes how and with whom we explore future-making.
Being guided by feminist epistemologies means going beyond centering marginalized positions by reflexively engaging with our own position(s) as researchers. Building on Donna Harraway (1991, p. 190), exploring future(s) and future-making through feminist frameworks would mean to “learn to see faithfully from another’s point of view”, and to do so with “love and care”. In my research, this approach allowed me to learn from migrant domestic workers about aspiring under overlapping forms of precarity, and from a Nepalese shop owner about neighborhood transformations and future visions of a postindustrial city. Learning that the living room of an Afghan woman can become a node within local arrival infrastructures exemplifies what feminist frameworks expose: the intimate ways in which individuals construct the social fabrics that builds the foundation of local futures. Building my migration research on feminist epistemologies showed me that these forms of enacting and making future(s) are constitutive forces in the places I study.
Holding multiplicity
Queer and feminist approaches became more than theoretical frameworks for me: they introduced me to ways of knowing that reshaped my understanding of research altogether. Their methods allow us to ask what daily practices, relationships, and imaginative work go into future-making when institutional structures offer limited pathways. In centering marginalized voices not as supplementary perspectives but essential knowledge, Queer and feminist approaches contest the commonplace erasure of migrants’ experiences, especially when marginalized by intersections of race, gender, sexual identity, class belonging, or legal status. They insist that their knowledge is precisely the perspective migration research must center to understand how alternative futures can be envisioned.
Perhaps most importantly for studying future-making, Queer and feminist methods encourage non-linear, multiple visions of futures in plural. While traditional research methods predict, model, forecast, to eventually plan, prepare, and prevent, Queer and feminist approaches are committed to multiplicity, contradiction, and simultaneity. This commitment exposes that in places of migrant arrival and settlement, there isn’t one future but many, existing together constructively or in tension: Municipal visions for diverse neighborhoods alongside long-term residents’ ideas of and responses to urban change; migrants’ aspirations that may or may not align with local ideas of ‘integration’ and belonging. Queer and feminist methods don’t force scholars to reconcile these visions, but challenge them to explore how they are negotiated. When talking to individuals across settings, we must avoid forcing experiences into temporally linear narratives or categories. Instead, we should create spaces for people to articulate futures visions that might seem contradictory to what we know or came to believe, e.g. interview participants wanting to stay and leave, both integrate and maintain difference, build something new while honoring what’s been lost, or choose on-migration despite ‘successful integration.’
For us as migration researchers, this means that our methods must be flexible enough to hold multiple temporal orientations at once. Researchers could use narrative and walk-along interviews, participatory mapping, photovoice, and collaborative, creative methods to reflexively capture the complex and multiplicitous ways in which futures are imagined and enacted.
Queer and feminist geographies reframe migration, shifting narratives from crisis or threat to visions of world-making and imagination. Today, this reframing is acutely needed as the extreme right continues to weaponize migration. This authoritarian turn calls for migration researchers’ vital role as interpreters; it demands thinking of migration futures ‘otherwise.’ Queer and feminist approaches attune us to how migrants construct futures that challenge the terms of their inclusion. Seeking such hopeful futures is not naïve: it is a means of mobilizing hope in ways that refuses to accept that futures are foreclosed. Queer and feminist geographies teach us to look for futures in unexpected places: the sideways movements of Queer time, knowledge produced at the margins, and the world-making practices of people told they don’t belong. Migration studies requires sophisticated frameworks for capturing multiplicity and non-linearity, alongside a normative orientation treating migration futures as generative starting points for scholarship committed to positive change. Queer and feminist geographies offer migration studies more than epistemological enrichment: they provide the conceptual ground to construct counter-narratives for alternative futures beyond crisis.
BIO: Norma Schemschat is research lead for the research area Futures of Migration at the IMIS where she explores how migration futures are imagined and produced within uneven geographies of future-making. She previously held positions at the Ecole normale superieure and the University of Amsterdam. Her fields of research include refugee arrival in smaller localities and ‘left behind’ places, urban spaces of hope, and migrant future-making.