SC Education and Social Inequality (EduSocial)
SC EduSocial organized a two-day workshop on anti-racism in education at the Free University of Amsterdam on 7-8 November 2023. The event included 4 panels (3 panels consisting of 3 presentations, one panel included 4 presentations), two keynote talks, and one reflection workshop. We received about 55 proposals and eventually selected 13 participants, most of whom are under-represented, early-career researchers joining from the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and the UK. The panels addressed issues including institutional norms, actors, policies on anti-racism, anti-racist pedagogies and counter-narratives, methodological issues on studying anti-racism, decolonial practices and anti-racist curriculum. Based on selected contributions from the workshop, the SC submitted a Special Issue proposal on Anti-Racism in European Education to Ethnic and Racial Studies, which is accepted for publication.
The SC EduSocial is also excited to welcome two new members: Fanny D’hondt and Yao Xie. Fanny is a senior researcher at the Department of Sociology of Ghent University, where she combines teaching and research. Her current research focuses on racism in secondary education and other societal domains. Fanny hopes to organize many inspiring (network) activities in the future. Yao Xie is a PhD student at University College Dublin, where she explores the health and well-being of migrant students in healthcare professions. Her interest focuses on human-AI interaction and its transformative effects on both individuals and society.
SC Gender and Sexuality in Migration Research (GenSeM)
SC GenSeM recently organized a Digital Writing Retreat on 7 October 2024, in collaboration with the PhD network of MITRA (IMISCOE's Standing Committee on Migrant Transnationalism) and the GenSeM PhD network. The SC has also recently launched a Call for Papers for an ECR Workshop on Intersectional Migration Research, jointly organised by GenSeM and the Forced Migration Standing Committee at the 2025 IMISCOE Annual Conference. Call for Papers here.
A two-day hybrid event will be organised by the GenSeM PhD rep Marwa Neji on 18-19 November 2024. The event will focus on “Bridging divides in gender migration studies: Enhancing North-South cooperation for inclusive knowledge production” and is a joint initiative of GenSeM, ITN DERM, CESSMIR and the Department of Conflict and Development Studies. Full programme here.
In winter 2025, GenSeM will also organize an online Migration Dialogue with the recipient of the GenSeM seed corn funding award, Nisha Zadhy. Her project is titled “Symbolic boundaries in humanitarianism: The co-production of vulnerabilities and resilience by Syrian refugee ‘volunteers’ in Turkey”.
SC Methodological Approaches and Tools in Migration Research (Meth@Mig)
The 4th Annual Meth@Mig Workshop will be held in April 2025: for the fourth year running, the SC Meth@Mig will host a workshop on crucial methodological challenges faced by scholars researching migrants and migration. The event will be organized jointly with the Junior professorship “Intercultural Praxis with a focus on Digital Culture” at Chemnitz University of Technology and will take place in Chemnitz (Germany), the European Capital of Culture 2025, on April 3-4 2025. The workshop format will offer researchers a rare opportunity for exchanging experiences regarding specific methodological problems as well as discussing the merits and hitches of alternative solutions. Scheduled contributions are very short, the emphasis lying firmly on extensive debate among all participants. Importantly, chosen topics are of interest beyond any specific methodological orientation as Meth@Mig’s Annual Workshops attract researchers who work with either qualitative, quantitative, digital trace methods or any combination of these, facilitating dialogue across all such approaches. Our prior Annual Workshops focused on the promises and pitfalls of digitization (Warsaw, 2022), the identification and mitigation of biases (Córdoba, 2023) and strategies for participant recruitment and sampling (Mannheim, 2024), respectively. They resulted in vivid and fruitful exchanges. A summary of the most recent event can be found on our Meth@Mig blog (https://www.imiscoe.org/news-and-blog/sc-blogs/meth-mig/2132-3rd-annual-methatmig-ws).
Watch out for the Call for Papers (working title: “Between Data and Dialogue: Participant Roles in Migration Research”), soon to be published on the IMISCOE website and via Meth@Mig’s mailing list (for which you can sign up by becoming SC member).
SC Migration, Citizenship and Political Participation Standing Committee (MIGCITPOL)
On 10-11 September 2024, SC MIGCITPOL organized its flagship annual event at El Colegio de México, in Mexico City. This was the first IMISCOE event in this country and hopefully the start for a stronger presence of IMISCOE in this region. This MIGCITPOL 3rd Annual Workshop had the theme of “Migrant Regularization: Processes, Pathways, and Mechanisms Linking Status to Citizenship”. It was a two-day hybrid event in which 20 papers were presented, authored by 32 authors from nearly all world regions (Europe, Americas, Asia, Africa), half of which were women. 17 authors attended the event in person, while the rest were present online. As a special measure to ensure inclusion of the audience attending online from within Mexico and Latin America, MIGCITPOL devoted funds to the simultaneous translation of the entire workshop into Spanish. The inauguration of the Workshop was celebrated by its hosts and co-convenors: Dr. Silvia Giorguli, President of El Colegio de México; Dr. Daniela Vintila, IMISCOE Associate Coordinator and Angeliki Konstantinidou, IMISCOE Network Officer; Dr. Luuk van der Baaren, Center for Excellence for Global Mobility Lay (MOBILE); Dr. Claudia Masferrer, Coordinator of Seminario MIGDEP of El Colegio de México; and Dr. Luicy Pedroza, MIGCITPOL co-coordinator. The Workshop was organized by Luicy Pedroza (El Colegio de México), Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero (Autonomous University of Madrid & Casa Grande University), Claudia Masferrer (El Colegio de México), Luuk van der Baaren (University of Copenhagen) and Victoria Finn (University of Oslo). We are already planning follow-up activities for the participants of this Workshop at the IMISCOE Spring Conference in Krems and the Annual Conference in Paris in 2025, as the SC takes the contributions presented on the path to develop one or possibly two collective publication projects.
As for upcoming activities, SC MIGCITPOL will soon issue a Call for a new PhD member in our SC coordination team. We are also planning to restart the MIGCITPOL Online Café in November, with a reorientation to more content-related presentations, inviting our members to make short presentations of their recently published works.
SC Migration, Migrants and Labour Markets (IILME)
SC IILME will organize a workshop on "The silence around “race” in the discourse of equality and inclusion in the labour market". While the debate on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) is becoming central to the rhetoric of institutional agencies and organizations across countries in the Global North, the extent to which this debate challenges discriminations embedded in the structure of power within organizations and in the wider labour market is still limited. Similarly to the discourse on “diversity” predominant in the past decades, DE&I can still support a predominance of the economic value over equity and social justice arguments, and the marginalization of specific axes of inequalities and in particular of “race”. In fact, while cross-country and cross-sectors difference exists in the extent to which a specific discourse around race has emerged, still inequality based on “race” remains a marginal(ised) domain of action.
This workshop aims at discussing this “silence” around race with specific reference to the labour market, by looking at how it emerges, is structured and “justified” in different national and organizational contexts. The aim is to underline how policies and practices related to equality in the labour market are embedded in specific historical, institutional and social traditions, including the presence of activism and social movements. These specific configurations affect the framing of equality across countries, and the specific way “race” is silenced, against the supposedly “homogenizing” effect of the international transferring of “business” practices. The workshop involves a discussion of comparative findings of an ESRC-funded research on the politics of equality across countries (UK, France, Spain and The Netherlands) carried out by scholars of the University of Manchester (work and equalities Institutes) and Grenoble. It will also involve reflections from expert scholars of different regional contexts.
The workshop is the result of a collaboration between SC IILME, SC RACED and the Work and Equalities Institute of the University of Manchester. It will be held on-line. Provisional date: 07/02/2025. Stay tuned!
SC Migration Politics and Governance (MigPoG)
In cooperation with Sciences Po Paris and the Institut Convergence Migrations, the SC MigPoG will co-organize a seminar on "Ukrainian exile in Europe: A turning point in the migration governance and for welcoming actors?" in Paris on 15 of November 2024. Six participants will discuss their papers analysing the emergence of new actors, forms of coordination as well as tension among different actors, and the development (or not) of new instruments of public policies.
Stay tuned! This year, MigPog will also collaborate with the Migration Policy Research Group at the University of Hildesheim for the Spring 2025 edition of the Writing Retreat! More information on the Call for Papers will follow soon.
SC Race, Racism and Discrimination (RACED)
SC RACED was established in July 2023 to make visible the emerging and dynamic field of research on race, racism and discrimination in IMISCOE. This Standing Committee aims at structuring the research on these topics among IMISCOE members, while fostering dialogue and partnership within the scientific community. Currently, 166 members are registered with SC RACED.
Summary of activities in Spring-Summer 2024: we organised our first official event, the Webinar ‘Structural, systemic and institutional racisms: challenges for conceptualization and empirical research’ on 23 May 2024. The SC invited representatives and members of the Standing Committee from three projects that received funding under the Horizon 2020 call Strengthening racial, ethnic and religious equality - HORIZON-CL2-2022-TRANSFORMATIONS-01-08. The SC had 35 members participating and engaged in discussing crucial points such as theorization and conceptualization of race in talking about racism, the differences between institutional and structural racism, the generalizability across contexts. In addition to the SC sessions that we organised at the IMISCOE Annual Conference in Lisbon, the steering group also organized two special sessions during this conference, and one in collaboration with SC Reflexivity in Migration Studies. An SC RACED member was represented in a panel discussion organized by the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Committee, defining what Diversity, Equality and Inclusion mean. We also recruited a couple of PhD candidates who joined our SC steering group. The three PhD candidates at SC RACED, Eduardo Campbell Bethancourt, Doris Niragire and Shahab Mirabaei now initiated activities to grow the PhD network within SC RACED. So far, the PhD network has created a space on Teams where junior scholars can easily chat and share ideas. A Zotero group was established where members can share key references related to theory and methodology. At the recent annual conference in Lisbon, the PhD representatives organized a guided tour that highlighted African influences in the city.
Upcoming activities in 2024: from the discussions with the members at the webinar in May and at the IMISCOE Annual Conference, an in-person workshop was developed to take place in Paris on 14-15 November 2024. This event is for members only and a Call for Paper presentations was circulated. The SC is so far targeting only members of the Standing Committee for the activities that are organized to strengthen the research group. New members are continuously accepted and the SC has also reached out to non-members who presented their work in the SC RACED section at the annual conference. Please contact
Our PhD network will engage in three main initiatives starting this Fall. Please fill in the form here to become a member and contact
- Every six weeks, the PhD network will hold a workshop where participants exchange texts. Each participant will serve as a designated commentator on a specific text. Before each workshop, texts will be shared, and the representatives will create a schedule.
- A task force will be formed with interested members to plan a thematic reading group. This group will meet regularly to discuss chapters of a book or specific articles that align with a common interest.
- A social media space, such as a WhatsApp group, will be established where members can easily share news, events, books, and articles.
SC Reflexivities in Migration Studies
SC "Reflexivities in Migration Studies" hosts the "Online Writing Retreat on Reflexivities in Migration Studies" for people working on a project in the field of migration studies and who seek a supportive and collaborative space to boost their writing productivity. This online writing retreat offers a unique opportunity for researchers, scholars, and students to come together and engage in focused writing sessions. Key Features are a 24/7 Online Space, Weekly Online Sessions, Once a month Sessions with extended inputs focusing on topics such as writing support, tools, and materials, and Resource Sharing through an exclusive online material sharing platform. If you are interested in participating, simply contact Paul (
In addition, the Reflexivities PhD Sessions Vol. IV (Winter 2024) is a collaborative platform where early-career researchers can present their work, exchange feedback, debate methodological and theoretical challenges, and expand their networks with peers interested in reflexive migration research. This is a supportive environment for young scholars eager to explore alternative research approaches, mindful of the power dynamics in knowledge production about migration and striving to de-nationalize and de-migranticize studies of mobility and diversity. PhDs and early-career researchers contributing to Reflexivities in Migration Studies are warmly invited to express their interest in presenting, discussing, or participating in other capacities in our online sessions. For information on how to participate, please contact Paul (
We are also inviting you to subscribe to our SC Reflexivities Newsletter via this link: https://imiscoe.us22.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=cc19b00be43245064f59d1d5f&id=efaa0b60a6. The purpose of our newsletter is to share the latest activities of SC Reflexivities in Migration Studies, as well as relevant publications, events, academic jobs and other news from within and beyond the standing committee.