IMISCOE provides a platform for scholars throughout the world to get together, initiate comparative research and organize joint research projects. The network supports and maintains a broad range of Standing Committees (SC) that cover significant topics in migration studies, in line with the special expertise of its members. The development of common lines of study is primarily research-driven. IMISCOE derives its relevance for society in general and for policy and politics in particular from its theory-based, analytical contributions.
How well do you know what they do? Are you curious about what different strands of research we have in IMISCOE? Below we tried to summarize them below for you!
You are also warmly invited to attend the Annual Meetings that Standing Committees are organizing during the 2024 IMISCOE Annual Conference taking place in Lisbon and online.
SC Education and Social Inequality (EduSocial)
The intersection between social inequality and education has always been an important topic for the IMISCOE Network fostering innovative comparative research across countries. The ongoing central importance of the field of education – at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels – is key for understanding international migration patterns, experiences and outcomes. Furthermore, it is through education that social inequalities are sustained, increased, or abolished. This is why “social inequality” is at the core of the SC research. The Standing Committee EduSocial aims to advance critical theoretical discussions on social inequalities in education access and outcome, education-to-work transitions, and international mobility and education (e.g., students and refugees).
SC Families, Welfare, Care and the Life Course (former SC Older Migrants)
The SC Older Migrants has recently expanded its focus and changed its name into SC Families, Welfare, Care and the Life Course. As such, the Committee seeks to: draw attention in migration studies to the inter-connections between families, welfare and care, and their changing contexts; advance a life-course perspective in migration studies, by facilitating dialogue between scholars working on different life-course phases and transitions; contribute to local, national and international policy debates on welfare and care as they relate to migrants and their families, advocating for interventions to mitigate social risks across the migratory life-course; facilitate the career development of the next generation of researchers working in these fields and create more synergies between scholars based in different regions of the world; develop joint publications, collaborative projects and applications for funding between scholars working on these topics.
SC Gender and Sexuality in Migration Research (GenSeM)
The SC GenSeM is an international platform for over 300 researchers working at how gender and sexuality shape migration pathways and settlement experiences. Key to GenSeM’s ethos is to engage in dialogues with scholars across disciplines, career stages, and geographical locations. To this end, we organize Migration Dialogues, online or hybrid conversations on research by GenSeM members; support the development of PhD and early-career researchers through a diverse set of workshops and retreats; and support the development of small-scale research through seed-corn funding.
SC Methodological Approaches and Tools in Migration Research (Meth@Mig)
The SC Meth@Mig provides a forum for discussing methodological approaches and tools in migration research and assessing the best options available for tackling manifold methodological challenges. The Standing Committee takes on a pluralist perspective as it addresses (1) issues relevant across a wide range of research methods in migration studies, such as obtaining informed consent in cross-cultural settings, gaining access to hard-to-reach populations, operationalizing relevant concepts, and leveraging the potential of new communication technologies, as well as (2) issues relevant for specific research approaches (quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods or experimental) as applied to the study of international migration in all its facets and dimensions.
SC Migrant Transnationalism (MITRA)
The objective of the SC Migrant Transnationalism (MITRA) is to provide an arena within IMISCOE for academic exchange on migrant transnationalism. The transnational turn was an innovation in migration studies and offered a new perspective for overcoming the limitations of methodological nationalism. It has provided new insights into integration issues, the functioning of diasporas, political movements, economic and social remittances and methodological strategies for multi-sited research. It has also questioned the very notion of migration. In many cases, people who lead transnational lives are a challenge to dominant conceptualizations of migration, undermining the assumption that people move from one country to another and remain settled in one place. MITRA, through a wide range of academic activities and publications, contributes to these theoretical, conceptual and methodological discussions from an open and reflective standpoint.
SC Migration, Citizenship and Political Participation (MIGCITPOL)
The core mission of the SC MIGCITPOL is to compare how citizenship status and rights are legally regulated, and explore how the resulting institutional opportunity structure influences migrants’ access to naturalization and their political participation in origin and residence countries. The SC thus combines a top-down analytical approach aiming to understand how underlying regulations regarding naturalization and enfranchisement evolve over time and across countries with a bottom-up focus on migrants’ practices of engagement in electoral and non-electoral mobilizations aiming at influencing the political decision-making process.
SC Migration, Migrants and Labour Markets (IILME)
The SC IILME focuses on the links between increasing migration, labour market dynamics and access to welfare resources, central to the discourse on both migration and integration policies. Negative views on the socio-economic effects of migration, often based on scarce scientific or empirical evidence, influence the political debate around these themes. However, little knowledge exists on the role of labour market actors in influencing migration and integration policies and practices, as well as the migrants’ labour market positions and experiences. SC IILME aims at exploring the complexities and contradictions of the interaction between migration phenomena and the labour market in a time of rapidly changing migration, integration and labour market policies. The SC seeks to combine the tradition of industrial relations, political economy — especially research on segmented labour market(s) — and gender studies to explore multiple intersectional inequalities as well as the precarization of migrant and ethnic workers within labour markets. In an endeavour to make IILME more inclusive, the Standing Committee recently changed its name from “Immigration, Immigrants and the Labour Market in Europe” to “Migration, Migrants and Labour Markets”.
SC Migration Politics and Governance (MigPoG)
The SC Migration Politics and Governance (MigPoG) takes a broad and comprehensive approach to the study of migration policy, one which aims at promoting dialogue between scholars focusing on the politics and governance of migration. MigPoG starts from the assumption that in a context of increasing politicization of migration, governance and politics should be thematized as two facets of the same coin. The SC has the ambition of covering migration policy in a broad sense, including immigration, emigration, border control, integration, asylum seekers and refugees, etc. From a geographical point of view, MigPoG intends to contribute to the overcoming of the national-government and receiving country-centred bias of much research on migration policy, which is still highly characterized by a Eurocentric (or more broadly West-centric) approach. From a disciplinary perspective, the SC aims at catalyzing scholars working on migration policy from different approaches, reflecting an understanding of policy as the product of the interaction between multiple actors. MigPoG will also include different methodological approaches to the study of migration politics and governance, and more specifically both quantitative and qualitative methods.
SC Race, Racism and Discrimination (RACED)
The SC Race, Racism and Discrimination (RACED) is a forum for researchers to engage in interdisciplinary conversations with an ambition to more adequately conceptualize and empirically study racial inequalities and racial exclusion, and to epistemologically and institutionally contribute to racial equity and justice. Starting from the assumption that racial inequalities are globalized and can be found in all societies in the world, the SC RACED aims to scientifically address race, racism and discrimination in migration studies as follows:
- in a multi-temporal perspective to catch the past still living in specific distinctive racial frames, mechanisms, dynamics and events of our time;
- by acknowledging that social relations and practices based on racial distinctions are embedded in a system that even unwittingly reproduce the racial frame and renew mechanisms of racialization;
- by considering different forms of racism (systemic, structural, institutional, collective and individual, intentional and unintentional, manifest and subtle), racial frames and mechanisms at different social scales (micro-meso-macro level), with the ambition to investigate and understand the role race, racism and discrimination play in social dynamics;
- by acknowledging that the constitution of whiteness connected to the white privilege contributed to the conception of the very category of ‘migrants’ as a racialized category, intertangled so far with that of race. In this sense, an epistemological work on the categories used in migration studies and their meanings is essential.
SC Reflexivities in Migration Studies (Reflexivities)
The aim of the SC Reflexivities is to push forward a reflexive (and self-reflexive) perspective within migration studies. Given the growth, relevance and responsibility of migration studies, the SC Reflexivities strives to promote reflexivity in migration research and to investigate on how the field of migration studies has emerged and is currently changing. Being reflexive in these two senses involves investigating how knowledge on migration is produced, circulated and utilized – both by us as researchers as well by other actors in the field. This endeavour tackles the embeddedness of the field of migration studies in wider societal and power relations and the risk to reproduce hegemonic structures.
SC Superdiversity, Migration and Cultural Change (DIVCULT)
The SC DIVCULT aims to better understand the relevance of arts and culture in the theoretical and policy debates about immigrant incorporation and diversity. Over the last years, artistic activities have found increasing interest among migration researchers because they prove to be a means of moving beyond ethnic differences towards narratives of identity and belonging that are more apt to capture the current post-migrant reality in many cities and countries. The SC intends to cover a wide range of artistic and cultural activities in the analyses ranging from music, literature, cinema and theatre to sports, fashion, clothing, design and food.