IMISCOE, the world's largest network focusing on migration and diversity, is proud to have an official book series in collaboration with Springer. This collection showcases empirical and theoretical research on diverse facets of international migration. Authored by experts in the field, these publications serve as a comprehensive resource for both researchers and individuals interested in migration studies. The series, consisting of over eighty titles, is meticulously curated under the watchful eye of our IMISCOE Editorial Committee, which comprises a diverse group of renowned scholars. The internationally peer-reviewed nature of the series ensures the preservation of exceptional academic standards and high scholarly quality. Most of these invaluable resources are freely accessible to the public. Here you will find a review and recap of the latest publications.
Latest publications in 2025:
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Immigrant Health: New Insights from Spain
Editors: Mikolaj Stanek, Sol P. Juárez,Miguel Requena
This open access book analyses the ever-complex relationship between immigration and health in contemporary societies using the Spanish society as a case study. It addresses some of the main dimensions of migrant health in Spain, including migrant-specific vulnerability factors, health changes associated with time spent at the migratory destination, and differentiated problems of certain subpopulations of migrants. The book also examines some of the factors associated with migrant health and explores the mechanisms that might explain this nexus, such as early childhood development, adult and older age health conditions, health practices and coping skills, health culture, social support, physical environment, and access to medical care and health services. While contributing to the effort to create a more comprehensive view of the health status and outcomes of immigrants in developed societies, the book will prove to be a valuable resource to academics, health professionals, various levels of stakeholders and decision-makers, representatives of civil society, and NGOs.
Migration, Transnational Flows, and the Contested Meanings of Race in Asia
Editors: Shanshan Lan, Miloš Debnár
This open access edited volume addresses the multi-layered relations between migration, transnational flows, and the contested meanings of race in Asia. It tries to answer the following questions: how do migration and transnational flows from the Western world impact racial knowledge formation in Asian societies? To what extent do they challenge, perpetuate, and reshape unequal power relations based on the intersection of race, gender, class, nationality, citizenship, and migration status in Asia? How are dominant Western racial categories such as race, whiteness, and blackness redefined and reconstructed in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, when transnational mobility became both heavily restricted and stigmatized ? The book is divided into three parts: Race, Language and Migration status, Covid-19 and the Dynamics of Racialization, Gender and Interracial Encounters. This book positions itself in the nexus of race, migration and pandemic research and will make a significant contribution to critical race studies, whiteness studies, globalization, multiculturalism, and social transformation in Asia. This book is aimed at students and scholars in race and migration studies in Asia and beyond.
Between Protection and Harm: Contested Vulnerabilities in Asylum Laws and Bureaucracies
Editors: Luc Leboeuf, Cathrine Brun, Hilde Lidén, Sabrina Marchetti, Delphine Nakache, Sylvie Sarolea
This open access book dissects the current narratives of ‘vulnerability’ in asylum laws and policies, by unpacking the meanings, productions, and performances, of ‘vulnerability’ in different contexts, from countries of first asylum in the Global South to Europe and Canada. It discusses how the increased reliance on ‘vulnerability’ to guide states’ replies to refugee movements improves refugee protection, while also generating contestations and exclusionary effects that may cause harm. Based on data collected as part of the EU Horizon 2020 VULNER project, the book examines existing legal and bureaucratic approaches to refugees’ vulnerabilities, which it confronts with the refugees’ experiences and understandings of their own life challenges. It analyses the perspectives from state actors, humanitarian organisations, and social and aid workers, as well as the refugees themselves. By emphasizing how these perspectives relate and feed into each other, the book unpacks the humanitarian replies from states and the international community to refugee movements – including in their implied exclusionary dimensions that generate contestations and implementation difficulties which, if not tackled and understood properly, risk exacerbating and/or producing vulnerabilities among refugees.
Cities of Migration: Understanding the diversity of urban diversities in Europe
Authors: Asya Pisarevskaya, Peter Scholten
This open access book develops a typology of cities by exploring how current levels of migration-related diversity and segregation relate to three groups of factors: international mobilities, inequalities and political-institutional aspects of local governance. Based on both quantitative and qualitative data from 16 cities in four European countries (France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Italy), the book compares the cities and uses a method of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. It demonstrates the shared contingencies of factors among the cities within each type and the crucial differences between the types of localities, and offers a more differentiated, holistic understanding of migration-related diversity configurations through the five conceptualised types: (1) Superdiverse cities, (2) Postindustrial diverse cities. (3) Middle class diverse cities, (4) Divided cities, and (5) Marginal migration cities. As such, the book is a valuable read to all those who would like to learn more about urban migration-related diversity and how it is formed and governed.
Publications in 2024:
Excluding diversity: Anti-migrant and anti-gender intersections in politics, policies and daily lives
Editors: Laura Merla, Sarah Murru, Giacomo Orsini, Tanja Vuckovic Juros
This open access book critically examines how discourses and policies target and exclude migrants and their families in Europe and North America along racial, gender and sexuality lines, and how these exclusions are experienced and resisted. Building on the influential notion of intersectional borderings, it delves deep into how these discourses converge and diverge, highlighting the underlying normative constructs of family, gender, and sexuality. First, it examines how radical-right and conservative political movements perpetuate exclusionary practices and how they become institutionalized in migration, welfare, and family policies. Second, it examines the dynamic responses they provoke—both resistance and reinforcement—among those affected in their everyday lives. Bringing together studies from political and social sciences, it offers a vital contribution to the expanding field of migrant family governance and exclusion and is essential for understanding the complex processes of exclusion and the movements that challenge and sustain them. It expands academic discussions on populism and the politics of exclusion by linking them to the politicization of intimacy and family life. With diverse case studies from Europe, North, and Central America, it appeals to students, academics, and policymakers, informing future mobilizations against discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies in politics and society.
Global Elite Migrations: Agency and Networks of Migrant-Artists from the Former Soviet Bloc
Author: Irina Isaakyan
This open access book explores the lives and careers of migrating artists with the purpose to understand how they make use of their migrant-networks and how this process interacts with decisions they make about immigration and career development. Situated at the crossroads of Migration Studies and Elite Studies, this interdisciplinary research is based on sixty interpretive biographic interviews with opera singers from the former Soviet bloc who work in various places across Europe and beyond. The book raises the question to what extent they exercise agency as migrants and professionals and to what extent they preserve their professional elitism on the transnational level. The case of these migrant-artists serves to illuminate the dynamics of a wider phenomenon - global elite migrations - which is compared with an intergalactic journey. Through this sociological metaphor, the book offers a new analytical framework to think about the “agency-network” nexus.
Decided Return Migration: Emotions, Citizenship, Home and Belonging in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Author: Aida Ibričević
This open access book creates conceptual links between political emotions, citizenship, home and belonging. The book describes that, in the case of decided return and reintegration to a post-conflict society and a fragmented state, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, the returnees do not conceptualize the emotional dimension of their BiH citizenship as home and belonging as this citizenship does not make them feel safe and secure. Instead, “feeling at home” is found in family, place and time, while belonging is categorized as ethnic, religious, relational, landscape, linguistic, and economic. The emotional dimension of the home state citizenship is constituted through a wide spectrum of emotions, ranging from anger, frustration, fear, guilt, shame, disappointment, nostalgia, powerlessness, to patriotic love, pride, defiance, joy, happiness and hope. This book provides a valuable resource to students and scholars of migration and diaspora studies, as well as political scientists, human geographers and anthropologists.
Taking Vulnerabilities to Labour Exploitation Seriously: A Critical Analysis of Legal and Policy Approaches and Instruments in Europe
Author: Letizia Palumbo
This Open Access book intends to contribute to the debate on migrant labour exploitation by exploring the extent to which the EU and the European countries provide a standard for protecting migrant workers. It moves from a socio-legal and theoretical perspective and builds on critical studies on vulnerability, exploitation, trafficking and migrant labour regimes – along with relevant feminist theories, including theories on social reproduction – while also drawing on extensive fieldwork. By mobilising the concept of ‘situational vulnerabilities’, the book critically investigates the assemblage and interaction of factors creating and amplifying migrant workers’ vulnerabilities to exploitation in the key sectors of agriculture and domestic work. The aim is to highlight how situations of vulnerability to exploitation are generated and exacerbated by relevant legal and policy frameworks, underlining and questioning the tensions, continuities, and ambiguities between different regimes, such as the regimes regulating labour migration and those intended to combat severe exploitation. While at the national level, the focus is on relevant Italian legal and policy instruments and approaches, the book also offers a comparative look at those adopted in the UK.
Migration and Cities: Conceptual and Policy Advances
Editors: Anna Triandafyllidou, Amin Moghadam, Melissa Kelly, Zeynep Şahin-Mencütek
This Open Access book brings together different perspectives on migration and the city that are usually discussed separately to show the special character of the urban context as a territorial and political space where people coexist, whether by choice or necessity. Drawing on heterogeneous situations in cities in different world regions (including Europe, North America, the Middle East, South, Southeast and East Asia and the Asia Pacific) contributions to this volume examine how migration and the urban context interact in the twenty-first century. The book is structured in four parts. The first looks at cities as hubs of cultural creativity, exploring the many dimensions of cultural diversity and identity as they are negotiated in the urban context. The second focuses on what lies outside the large urban centres of today, notably suburbs, while the third part engages with migration and diversity in small and mid-sized cities, many of which have adopted strategies to welcome growing numbers of migrants. Last but not least, the fourth part looks at the challenges and opportunities that asylum-seeking and irregular migration flows bring to cities. By providing a variety of empirical cases based on various world regions, this book is a valuable resource for researchers, students and policymakers.
Migrants with a Precarious Status: Evolving Approaches of European Cities
Authors: Sarah Spencer,Ilker Ataç, Zach Bastick, Adrienne Homberger, Simon Güntner, Maren Kirchhoff, Marie Mallet-Garcia
This Open Access book is an exploration of city responses to migrants with precarious status in Europe. It provides new evidence and analysis from research on three cities in Austria, Germany and the UK: Vienna, Frankfurt and Cardiff. The book explores strategies and services of municipal authorities toward precarious migrants and their cooperation with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in service provision. It focuses on healthcare, education, housing and access to advice; and particular attention is given to the situation of women. The book develops the concept of precarity in relation to migration status, and of horizontal governance arrangements within municipal authorities. It explores the tension between exclusion and inclusion of migrants who have limited rights of access to welfare services and contributes evidence on the factors shaping municipal policymaking, as well as on the framing of rationales for providing access to essential services.
Migration and Home- IMISCOE Short Reader
Authors: Mastoureh Fathi, Caitríona Ní Laoire
This open access short reader offers an intersectional perspective on the meaning of home in migration. The book provides a pathway through existing scholarship on home and migration, exploring how intersectional power relations and transnational migration regimes are felt, experienced, lived and navigated by migrants, who are differently positioned, in the making and imagining of home. The meanings associated with home are composed of the interrelation of places, spaces, people, social relations, materialities, emotions and temporalities. These multiple aspects highlight the complexities inherent in the idea of home, which come to the fore particularly when one moves location. Migration and Home explores these issues by focusing on specific key aspects of home in migration: home and gender; home and age; home and materiality; and home and migration status, class and race. It proposes the concept of structural im/possibilities as a framework for understanding the power relations and structures that shape where, when and for whom home in migration is more, or less, possible.
Cultural Change in Post-Migrant Societies: Re-Imagining Communities Through Arts and Cultural Activities
Editor: Wiebke Sievers
This Open Access book links the artistic and cultural turn in migration studies to the larger struggle for narrative and cultural change in European migration societies. It proposes theoretical and methodological approaches that highlight how ideas of change expressed in artistic and cultural practices spread and lead to wider cultural change. The book also looks at the slow processes of change in large cultural institutions that emerged at a time when culture was nationalised. It explains how individual and group activities can have an impact beyond their immediate surroundings. Finally, the book discusses how migration researchers have cooperated with arts and cultural producers and used artistic means to increase the effect of their research on the wider public. As such, the book provides a great resource for graduate students and researchers in the social sciences and the humanities who have an interest in migration studies and want to move beyond interpreting the world towards changing it.
Migrations in the Mediterranean- IMISCOE Regional Reader
Editors: Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Ibrahim Awad
This Open Access Regional Reader describes population movement circulating within the Mediterranean area, for any reason or from any region, be it European, African, Asian or originating from any of the Mediterranean shores. It showcases a plurality of approaches to and applications of Mediterranean migration, contributing to a regional approach to migration studies, thereby defending this regional approach by scaling Mediterranean migration issues. This book covers a large set of questions related to Mediterranean migrations to the migration research agenda, such as market and economy, politics and policies, super-diversity and intersectionality, media, society, welfare and the environment five main parts: Geo-political Mediterranean Relations, Governance, Policies and Politics, Mobility drivers and Agency, Cities, History and Social Transformations, and Economy and Labour Markets. This Regional Reader provides an interesting read to scholars, researchers, but also policymakers and civil society organizations’ high representatives, international foundations and institutions interested in linking the Mediterranean and migration.
Migration and Identity through Creative Writing Stories: Strangers to Ourselves
Editors: Alka Kumar, Anna Triandafyllidou
This Open Access book brings together storytelling and self-narrative, creative writing and narrative enquiry to explore a variety of topics in migration from an experiential lens. The volume is hybrid and multi-genre as it contains both scholarly chapters grounded in academic perspectives, as well as personal essays and creative non-fiction. In addition to critical reflections on key migration topics and concepts – like, identity and diversity, integration and agency, transnationalism and return – the scholarly chapters also propose a particular methodology for ‘workshopping’ migration narratives, and writing about (personal) lived experiences through iterations of scientific reflection, narrative enquiry, and creative imagination. The book explores the potential of a new conceptual paradigm and methodological process to learn more, and also `differently,’ about the migration experience. Finally, this volume asks a bigger question too – how do we define the boundaries of research; is it possible to entirely separate the spatial, temporal and methodological parameters in which projects are developed and pursued; and how can the specifics of these multiple contexts contribute to shaping the knowledge being produced?