Call for Papers

19th IMISCOE Annual Conference 
June 29 - July 1, 2022, Oslo, Norway

Age as a vantage point on time and migration
Victoria Kumala Sakti, Dora Sampaio, Megha Amrith
Submission deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2021
This panel engages with an emerging ‘temporal turn’ in the social sciences in recent years.  Specifically, it reflects on how temporal experiences of migration and the life course intersect. We follow Catherine Allerton’s (2021) assertion that age and our positions in the life course play central roles in our perceptions of time and experiences of migration, and should receive more analytical attention. Relational approaches to migration and age further invite us into thinking about the connections, tensions, and interdependencies between both phenomena. In this panel, we propose age as a vantage point for understanding the lived experiences of time and migration.

Contested categories in the context of migration
Ulrike Bialas, Johanna Lukate, Vanessa Rau
Submission deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2021
This panel will examine contested categories in the context of migration. We consider migration and related phenomena as especially fruitful sites for unpacking existing categories and categorization systems of all kinds and for recognizing novel and emerging ones. Governments, the public, and actors involved in processes of migration negotiate categories under extremely high stakes and often with unequal and shifting power relations.

Migrant Entrepreneurship in times of migrant-led diversity
Sakura Yamamura, Paul Lassalle (, University of Strathclyde)
Submission deadline for abstracts: 1 December 2021
Diversity is becoming the context through which researchers can account for different aspects of increasingly complexifying conditions of both entrepreneurship and migration. Taking a superdiversity perspective, we are editing the Research Handbook on Entrepreneurship and Diversity (under contract with Edward Elgar). The edited book uncovers and conceptualises what is diversifying particularly in entrepreneurship. We identify three different dimensions of diversity and diversification affecting the activities of entrepreneurs at large: Diversity of Entrepreneurs, Diversity of Entrepreneurship Context and Diversity of Entrepreneurial Strategy.

Diversity support: structures, motivations and mobilization
Eloisa Harris, Karen Schönwälder
Submission deadline for abstracts: 9 December 2021
Migration scholars in the European context have traditionally paid close attention to public opinion against immigration and the persistence of racism. In contrast, less attention has been devoted to pro-immigration and anti-racist attitudes and mobilization strategies of social actors. Yet, in many contemporary European societies, majorities are favourably disposed towards urban and national socio-cultural diversity: Many hundreds of thousands recently actively welcomed and supported refugees, and the proliferation of support for Black Lives Matter activities, despite a pandemic, reify this image of rather pro-diversity sentiment.

British Journal of Social Psychology
Submission deadline for full papers: 31st October 2021
The special issue editors (Geetha Reddy, Clare Coultas and Johanna Lukate) are seeking papers for an upcoming special issue in the British Journal of Social Psychology (BJSP) dedicated towards developing a social psychology of precarity.
Across the social sciences precarity has been advanced as a key concept for studying the social challenges that we face today: in sociology, ‘the precariat’ are conceived as a new category of people (e.g. Standing, 2011; Roy, 2019); in human geography, precarity is analysed as the production of ‘lifeworlds’ characterised by uncertainty and insecurity (Waite, 2009); and in anthropology, attention is put towards ‘collateral afterworlds’ where the redemptive promises of sociality and progress fall short (Wool & Livingston, 2017). Social psychological discussions on this topic are strikingly absent. In a 2015 keynote, Michelle Fine described precarity as a profoundly psychological idea, being “the sense of the predictability of the unpredictable, the experience of contingency and fear, (and how) the deep embodied sense of insecurity is… existential and affective, and it’s in all of our lives”. Precarity is not only something that affects the most marginalised amongst us; it underpins the way society is structured; it is not the exception but the rule (Mahmud, 2015). Nevertheless, precarity is also a ‘politically induced condition’ (Butler, 2009), it is structural (Fine, 2015), and certain populations are more affected than others. Questions remain about how we, as psychological scholars, can better acknowledge and engage with precarity when much of our theorising and methodologies hold presumptions of security, control, and consistency. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further exposed and amplified the precariousness of the lives of many individuals and communities worldwide, painfully highlighting the asymmetries and politically induced differences in people’s exposure to injury, violence and death. We view it as a matter of ethics that psychologists engage with this issue of precarity, and reflect on our own complicity in the political contexts that constitute its continued neglect. more

Workshop organized by  Hania Sobhy (MPI-MMG), Salwa Ismail (SOAS) and Nadine Abdalla (AUC) and supported by the Department Socio-Cultural Diversity, MPI-MMG
30 September – 1 October 2021, Berlin

With the first wave of the Arab Uprisings, it became apparent that new frameworks were needed for understanding the diverse experi-ences, resources and aspirations of Arab pub-lics. The unprecedented scale of collective ac-tion presented serious challenges to the status quo, and triggered major regional and global developments, including a new wave of migra-tion across the Mediterranean that remains at the forefront of European politics.  With still unfolding repercussions, 2019 witnessed a second wave of the Arab uprisings with major protests in five more countries in the region. This workshop explores new ways of thinking about the everyday experiences that shape political outcomes in the Arab region and its diasporas. While many scholars have exam-ined the causes of the uprisings and the institutional arrangement and re-arrangements that followed, little research has been carried out on how the everyday realities, transforma-tions and dislocation are lived by different cat-egories of citizens. more

Special Issue project
Editors: Dora Sampaio and Megha Amrith

Today, two thirds of the world’s older adults live in developing regions, where their numbers are growing faster than in the developed regions. In 2050, it is estimated that nearly 8 in 10 of the world’s older persons (aged 60 years old and more) will be living in developing parts of the world (UN, 2017; 2019). While existing data clearly demonstrate that the numbers of ageing individuals are expected to increase more sharply in Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, and Africa in the forthcoming decades, research agendas have remained primarily focused on ageing populations in the ‘global north’ and the socio-spatial ramifications that these demographic processes have on the ‘global south’. What is overlooked is a recognition of experiences in regions of the south that are themselves ageing and the social transformations and forms of translocal mobility that occur in conjunction. more