"We Need to Remind Ourselves that Migration and Mobility itself Reconfigures Eco-social Systems"

Published 5 September 2017

In this short interview, Mine Islar, Coordinator for Transdisciplinary Approaches to Migration Research 2017/2018, explains why the first seminar under the initiative will focus on ecologies of migration.

What will be the focus of the first seminar?

The first seminar of the initiative focuses on the interlinkages between resources, environmental challenges and mobility as well as understanding migration as an adaptive strategy for humans, facing challenges ranging from environmental pressures to violent conflicts.

Why do you start with this specific focus?

We hope such a focus offers a different take, one that reminds us that migration and mobility itself reconfigures eco-social systems, that it has the effect of replacing certain relations to nature and environment, food, land and energy production. Also, such focus allows us to present different methodologies that can be used in migration research such as GIS.

What are the most pressing challenges in migration research at the moment?

At the moment concepts like migrant, refugees and asylum seekers are used in public discourses to frame the ‘dangerous other’. If shaped by this understanding, political priorities of national governments might be a challenge for migration research as they might prioritise funding for particular research such as classical costs and benefit analysis or security studies. However, initiatives like ours aim to broaden the scope and hope to cover as many approaches to, and conceptions of, migration as possible.

Why do you think it is important to start up this kind of initiative?

In this initiative, without underestimating the tragedies and problems related with forced migration and humanitarian crisis, we would like to talk about migration in a broader sense where migration is treated as a process which encompasses a variety of phenomena across different disciplines, departments or faculties. We want to create a platform where we can jointly create new conceptual and methodological approaches to address processes linked to migration.