Welcome to the sixth edition of the IMISCOE Bulletin! This issue is released right before the opening of our 2023 IMISCOE Spring Conference hosted by the University of Côte d’Azur (Nice).
The Bulletin is one of the main communication channels of IMISCOE with its 63 Member Institutes and the wider community of individuals and institutions interested in our activities. It is built around contributions from the External Affairs Committee and the IMISCOE Network Office based at the University of Liège.
Since our last bulletin in the Summer of 2022, members of our research network have been incredibly productive. Among the numerous events organized by our members and standing committees, we wish to underline how much has been done for PhD students and early career researchers by our PhD network —hosting a PhD Day and launching three rounds of the PhD Buddy Programme— and by our PhD Academy which launched its second cohort last fall (see the reflections of Marta Bivand Erdal on “Attempting a decolonial approach with the IMISCOE PhD Academy” in this Bulletin). Next month, our Annual IMISCOE PhD School will also be hosted in Brussels by a consortium of Belgian member institutes: BIRMM (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), CEDEM (Université de Liège), CESSMIR (Ghent University) & The Network on Migration and Global Mobility (University of Antwerp).
In the coming months, our research network will host more events and promote more opportunities for researchers at all stages of their career. This will include our 20th Annual Conference hosted by CMR in Warsaw and online on 3-6th July; an event for which registration was recently opened.
This week, all eyes are on our 2023 Spring Conference which is hosted by URMIS- University of Côte d’Azur, from 15 to 17th March. For this bulletin, we therefore sat down with Yvan Gastaut to discuss the topic selected by his institute for the conference: “Postcolonial migrations- heritages, specificities, mobilizations”. As shown in the interview, this topic is very much in line with IMISCOE’s commitment to promote reflexive scholarly debates around issues of race and anti-racism. To this end, our network also counts with the support of the newly created IMISCOE Executive Committee on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion.
This issue of the Bulletin also includes an editorial written by Cristina Mas, senior world editor at ARA newspaper. In her piece, she wished to challenge our research community to intensify collaborations with journalists in order to change dominating narratives around migration. In addition, we interviewed our colleague Ahmet İçduygu from Koç University in Istanbul who shares his reflections on the impact of the recent earthquakes in Turkey on migration dynamics in the region.
On the occasion of International Women's Day, this bulletin also showcases three recent books published in the IMISCOE Research Series with a specific focus on gender and migration. Make sure to check out these Open Access books and all the other volumes published in our thriving series.
To conclude, we would like to thank the chair of the External Affairs Committee, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, for having prepared this bulletin with the assistance of Eréndira León Salvador.
The IMISCOE Network Office
Jean-Michel Lafleur
Daniela Vintila
Angeliki Konstantinidou