Moving to Ireland as a student was more than just a change in geography for me—it was a profound shift in my cultural and spiritual life. While planning my departure, there was one thing I didn’t plan for, the need to recreate a sense of home in a foreign land. I quickly realized that it wasn’t just about finding my way around a new city or adjusting to the cold weather; it was about holding on to the things that made me feel connected to my roots. For me, that first connection came in the form of a small altar—a simple but powerful symbol of my broader cultural and spiritual identity that goe ..read more

In the journey towards a PhD, experiences of (presumed) recurring ‘failures’ are constant companions. As members of the IMISCOE PhD Network Board, we began to talk about failure two years ago, united by a shared struggle with imposter syndrome, feelings of inadequacy, and an often-overwhelming sense of not meeting the high standards that academia demands from us. Despite our different PhD trajectories, we all felt a pervasive sense of failure as part of our PhD trajectories, and an absence of safe spaces to discuss the implications of it as well as possible ways/strategies to address this. We ..read more

In the ongoing effort to disrupt oppressive relations in academia, there is a call to centre the body as a departure point from where to situate (and unsettle) the interweaved relationship between knowledge and power. Considering the body as an epistemological and ontological base has allowed us to map the lived, embodied experiences of those who move. It has also shifted top-down perspectives on migration towards more nuanced, muti-scalar approaches that consider migrants’ narratives on identity(ies), religion, family, gender, and memory, among others. Thus, a focus on mobile/displaced bodies ..read more

In this blog piece, Hazar Deniz Eker, a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, interviews Léopold Lambert, a trained architect and editor-in-chief of the Funambulist Magazine. The interview focuses on how multimodal research can contribute to academic, journalistic, and artistic fields by exposing the politicization of space and bodies in migration studies. In addition, Léopold Lambert remarks how his experience as an editor and curator helped him to create hybrid dissemination strategies for migration research that retain its academic nature while communicating in an engaging visual m ..read more

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The Kabyle, the Indigenous Amazigh people of Algeria, face unique challenges in contributing to the ongoing research on migration. It is a rarity to encounter a paper about Kabyle migrants in established migration studies journals authored by a Kabyle scholar. The positionality of Kabyle migrant scholars is a complex interplay between their home country's persecution and the stringent migration policies of the West. The existing literature in this field is predominantly from an outsider perspective, either Western scholars or migrant Kabyle scholars in exile, whose fieldwork and analyses often ..read more

“We are Black, Indian, Mestiza, Sudaka, racialised flesh. We reject your PDFs and your disembodied lectures. We deny every trend of being and return to listening to each other, looking each other in the eye, telling each other stories, and building from lived experience.”  Manifiesto AFROntera – Terremoto (n.d.)   In May 2024, we will release a Special Issue, "Towards Engaged Migration Research: Unpacking Positionality, Inequalities and Access.” This issue aims to explore engaged migration research in-depth, including its practice and politics. Our approach focuses on ..read more

My PhD project combines participatory visual methods with ethnography and archival research to understand the meaning of the border for its inhabitants. As a sub-study of the Reel Borders ERC project, I hosted Participatory Filmmaking (PF) workshops to study ‘border narratives’ in three distinct borderlands: Derry, at the Irish border; Ceuta, the Moroccan-Spanish border; and Adana, a Turkish city that has become home to over a quarter of a million Syrian displaced people. PF involves collaborating with a community to create films. This process draws from various practices such as storytelling ..read more

When a six-page interim order by the Indian Supreme Court displayed inhumanity in sending Rohingyas to Myanmar, where human rights violations are still ongoing, a 56-page judgment paved the way for a new era of refugee jurisprudence based strongly on the human rights of refugees.  This blog intends to revisit the interim order of the Indian Supreme Court in Mohammed Salimullah v Union of India in light of the recent judgement of the United Kingdom Supreme Court (UKSC) in R (AAA) v. Secretary of State Home Dept. This reflection on refugee jurisprudence matters as it addresses the role of d ..read more

Halfway through a nearly two-hour commute to the outskirts of the capital city of Delhi, India where I was to meet with a group of community leaders, I was overcome by a sudden feeling of nervousness. It was the first month of my fieldwork, conducting life history interviews with Rohingya refugees living in Delhi, India and so far, I had little progress to show. This meeting had been hard to arrange, not least because of the increasingly hostile policy landscape for Rohingya refugees in India. In September 2022, the community was just emerging from a media storm set off by a controversial twee ..read more