3rd International Conference on Migration and Mobilities – Call for Abstracts!

Concerns about inequalities and the unaffordability and insecurity of housing are rising up the political, policy and academic agendas. This theme encompasses scholarship in population geography and beyond on pressing concerns such as residential segregation, gentrification and shifting patterns and processes of internal migration. We welcome papers on these and other topics that are relevant to other issues of urban change, residential mobilities and internal migration.

The advent of the big data epoch and advances in computing power present significant opportunities for researchers to better understand and visually represent the everyday mobilities of people across space. However researchers are still grappling with ongoing challenges surrounding the accessibility and representativeness of these data and with how to analyse such overwhelming quantities of information. This theme encompasses these issues and we particularly welcome papers which showcase advances in our ability to visualise population mobilities.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, we are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. An unprecedented 71 million people around the world are forcibly displaced from their homes, with 26 million classed as refugees (over half of whom are under the age of 18). Understanding the involuntary movement of populations, and the responses of states to them through bordering practices, is thus a key contemporary issue of concern for migration scholars as well as governments and NGOs. We welcome papers which engage with issues of forced migration and the practices of bordering that are deployed in response to them.

Contentions around migration arguably sit at the heart of the key geopolitical fractures of our times. In this theme we seek to explore how understandings of migration might need to be rethought in light of ongoing political turbulence in the European context. As such we welcome papers that engage with topics such as Brexit, the European refugee crisis, the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe and the politics of anti-immigration controls.