Decentering and decolonizing migration research

Dear GLOCAL members,

We would like to invite you to a seminar entitled Decentering and decolonizing migration research featuring Dr. Beste Isleyen and Dr. Joris Schapendonk and moderated by Dr. Nora Stel. Please find a short introduction below.

The seminar will be held on 4 June 2024 at 15:30-17:00 at EOS 01.110 and is organized as part of the ‘Revisiting Interdisciplinary Migration Studies’ seminar series created in the context of the NWO-Veni project ‘The Power of Inaction and Ambivalence in Transnational Refugee Governance,’ in collaboration with the Horizon-Europe GAPs project. 
We are looking forward to seeing you all there.

Best regards,

GLOCAL Team
 
As most other fields and disciplines in contemporary academia migration studies has struggled with ambitions to decenter its knowledge production and decolonize its epistemologies. In a field engaging with borders, sovereignty, and mobility as central concepts much is at stake in these endeavors. Fundamental questions, however, remain to be broadly taken up: What could or should decolonizing migration studies mean? How to practically realize it? What can be done to ensure such efforts are not merely rhetorical or cosmetic? The third session of GLOCAL’s lecture series on interdisciplinary migration studies has the aim to explicate and reflect on the political, institutional, and methodological dimensions of various approaches to decolonizing and decentering migration studies. Political scientist Beste Isleyen discusses the inspiration that migration scholars may draw from critical security studies and postcolonial theory when it comes to revisiting the study of borders and mobility. Human Geographer Joris Schapendonk reflects on the ways in which research infrastructures and methodological reflexivity might contribute to decentering our understanding of migration.