Annual theme: 2025 – 2026: Change, hope and activism

In the midst of increasingly violent border policies that permeate institutional settings and political discourses a.o., migration scholarship is evolving beyond the mere production of knowledge for policy-making purposes. Instead, there is a burgeoning body of engaged scholarship on civic engagement, social movements, and migrant-led solidarity initiatives (della Porta & Steinhilper, 2022; Ataç et al. 2016; Tazzioli. 2021;…). Furthermore, interdisciplinary efforts are underway to examine how migrant rights struggles intersect with for example labour or environmental struggles, or how inequalities spanning race, class, and gender come into play. We believe that we can still learn from this sort of scholarship both in terms of content and methodologies, as they can open up interesting discussions on positionality, societal impact, and the role of academia beyond university as well as pathways for science communication to the broader public.

In addition, the social transformation perspective also enables us to acknowledge the intrinsic political and social potential of mobilities (Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013), and can foster hopeful thinking towards the future. This way we can account both for the agency, aspirations, and hopes of people on the move and how their resistance and struggles for identity and belonging link and engender new types of relations and politics.

In selecting this topic as annual theme in 2025-2026, CESSMIR will stimulate research and debate the interlinkages between migration (studies) and social change and social transformation. Through various theoretical paradigms, interdisciplinary efforts and methodological frameworks, we will focus on the interplay between mobility and social, economic, cultural and geopolitical processes that not only shape mobility flows but are also impacted by them in return as well as the active role that researchers and research can play in this regard. These issues will be explored in a variety of activities, including the Migration Research in Practice day, PhD workshops/lectures for master students and activities with and for academic and non-academic partners.