Past Symposiums

Especially since the 1980s, migration debates have largely focused on flows from the global South towards the global North. International news reports, scholarship, and different global policy fora have produced numerous representations and analyses of the realities of migrants escaping violence and abject poverty in “developing” countries and seeking, often through irregular routes, to reach the territories of “developed” countries.

The International Migration and Mobilities Graduate Student Symposium welcomes contributions that engage critically with this North-centrism of migration analyses and/or that explore different geographies of international migration. What sort of insights and theoretical innovations can be produced by redirecting our gaze towards other itineraries of global migration? Are there concepts or theoretical approaches that, produced in the context of mobility in the global South, might illuminate migration debates globally?

In the past few decades, forced and irregular migrants have faced increasing types of restrictions on their international mobility. These restrictions have been imposed mostly, but not exclusively, by countries of the global North, and they have led to the marginalization, exploitation, incarceration, expulsion, and often death of innumerable “undesirable” migrants in search of safety and survival.

The workshop welcomes contributions that investigate the policies, consequences, and responses that have emerged in this context of multiplying restrictions to certain kinds of human mobility. How have states and other actors sought to control and select legal entrance to and stay in their territories? How have migrants and those working in solidarity with them been affected by this restrictive trend, and how have they responded to it? What are the potential and limits of activism and research (including activist research) in this context?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had differential effects on the migration and mobility of various groups of people, often highlighting and exacerbating existing inequalities along race, gender, sexuality, status, social class and nationality lines. International migrants and refugees are some of the groups hardest hit by COVID at a time when governments around the world have sought fit to close borders, control movement and introduce new surveillance technologies.

In 2019, of the estimated 280 million international migrants, 160 million were migrant workers, often employed on the frontlines in service sectors, health care and/or food production. These workers have experienced not only the brunt of working through the pandemic but working and living in conditions where physical distancing and sanitation is often made more difficult.

So too, populations contained in refugee and migrant camps are subject to COVID outbreaks but without adequate sanitation and vaccinations at their disposal. Under pandemic times, racist tropes of migrants as diseased bodies have resulted in attacks on racialized groups of people. Yet, this period has also seen openings to raise awareness of inequalities between different groups.

The workshop welcomes papers that explore the impact of the pandemic on migrants and mobile populations. How have certain mobile populations been affected by the pandemic? How have governments and other actors used the pandemic to increase border controls and surveillance of certain bodies and to what effect? What, if any, are the opportunities for addressing long standing iss of inequality and racism and precarious status of certain groups that the pandemic might offer?