Equitable Migration Studies after the Crisis Script

Call for Contributions
26–29 September 2027 | University of Tartu, Estonia
[email protected]

Migration is repeatedly framed as crisis - an exceptional rupture, a threat to sovereignty, a humanitarian emergency, or a problem to be managed through security, law and expert knowledge. This framing does more than describe mobility. It categorises people into migrants and non-migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, deserving and undeserving subjects, temporary guests and permanent strangers. This conference asks what becomes possible when migration studies moves beyond the crisis script: when crisis is approached not as a description of contemporary mobility, but as a political, epistemic and representational frame that shapes governance, media narratives, public memory, research agendas, and mobile people's own possibilities for self-description.

The crisis script has had lasting effects. It has normalised emergency measures, expanded border infrastructures, and turned temporary restrictions into durable regimes of exclusion (Ticktin 2023; Desmond, Inlender and Kowalska 2025). It has produced certain mobile people - often racialised, gendered, legally precarious or marked by religion, class and geopolitical origin - as security threats, passive sufferers, legal cases, or objects of humanitarian intervention. It has also entered migration scholarship itself, encouraging event-centred, Northern-focused and policy-driven research that risks reproducing the very categories it seeks to critique (Cohen and Fogelman 2025). Yet these categories are neither self-evident nor stable. Migrants, refugees, mobile students and workers, people displaced by war, economic restructuring or family obligations, and those who refuse available labels negotiate, contest and sometimes strategically use such classifications in everyday life, legal encounters, archives, media and community memory.

In a moment marked by authoritarian politics, attacks on academic freedom, the criminalisation of solidarity, and the weaponisation of migration discourse, the need to rethink the conceptual and methodological foundations of migration studies is urgent. This means asking not only how migration is governed, but also how migration studies names, hears, archives and collaborates with people who move, wait, return, stay, or are made immobile.

The conference invites contributions that develop post-crisis approaches to migration research, teaching, representation and public knowledge. We are interested in how socio-legal research, memory studies, museum studies, archival practice, border studies, critical pedagogy, oral history and creative methods can unsettle crisis-driven epistemologies and produce more equitable modes of knowing. Meeting in Tartu, in a Baltic borderland shaped by shifting histories of emigration, refuge, minority belonging and security politics, the conference also asks how perspectives from Europe's eastern and northern margins can complicate dominant Western European crisis narratives.

Submitting a proposal

The conference welcomes a range of presentation formats. We particularly encourage PhD students and early career researchers to propose panels, roundtables or other discussion formats. Please send a proposal of approximately 300 words, indicating the format of your presentation as well as 3-5 keywords, and a short biographical note, to [email protected] by 15 December 2026.

Decisions will be communicated by 15 February, 2027.

Participation

The conference language is English. In-person participation is preferred, but limited opportunities for remote participation will also be available.

Organisers

The conference is organised by the Interdisciplinary Migration Network for Equitable Future (Imagine), a Thematic Network within the European University alliance ENLIGHT. IMAGINE unites several European research centers in migration, law and cultural studies: the International Public Law Centre (IPL) at the University of Bern, the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) at the University of Ghent, the Centre for Global Migration Studies (CeMig) at the University of Göttingen, the Human Migration and Mobility Lab (HuMM) at the University of Groningen, and the Institute for Cultural Research (ICR) at the University of Tartu.

For further information please contact the local organisation committee at [email protected]

See the full call for contributions here.