Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Migration is not only transforming sending, transit, and receiving countries, but also social scientific studies. The expansions of human mobility, profound demographic transformations, and their diverse social, political and economic consequences have brought unprecedented theoretical and empirical attention to the phenomenon. While migration research has relatively longer and more established tradition in US academia, its growth in European scholarship in the last three decades has been remarkable. An increasing number of scholars and journals devote their work to understanding causes and consequences, current situations, changes and continuities of migration-related issues in Europe. Moreover, the expansion of research centres and networks, undergraduate and graduate programs, conference meetings, winter and summer schools demonstrate increasing institutional visibility of migration research. For instance, IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration, and Social Cohesion), which is currently Europe’s largest network of scholars in the area of migration and integration, has grown from 19 founding member institutes in 2004 (Brus 2014) to 39 member institutes in 2017 and over 500 individual members. On the other hand, what is less evident is the systematic attention to the methodological issues in European migration studies. This edited volume presents an effort to address this gap, through the collaboration of migration scholars from diverse disciplines. It is a unique volume as it brings together a multidisciplinary perspective as well as illustrations of different issues derived from the research experience of the recognized authors.

As the dynamics of migration in Europe have been continuously changing, diverse empirical, theoretical, and methodological challenges have defined the landscape of migration research agenda. This chapter aims to reflect on the current state and overtime development of Qualitative Migration Research in Europe (QMR-E). For this purpose, we have conducted paper-by-paper analysis on original articles published between 2000 and 2016 in the (JEMS) and (ERS), two leading peer-reviewed journals in the field of migration research. Through this overtime analysis, we mapped the continuities and changes taking place in QMR-E with respect to their qualitative research methods, designs, research sites and groups, multi-level of analysis, and topics. In this respect, we aim to identify the dominant trends and existent gaps in QMR-E literature and to invite scholars to further develop the existing research agenda as well as to engage in new research directions.

Given the variety of types of migration, their overlapping nature, and their historical and geographical diversity, context is crucial when studying and researching migration. In the first part of this chapter, the essential character of migration as a space-time phenomenon is reflected in specifying a range of spatial and temporal contexts and categorisations. The second part of the chapter, the longest, explores the debate on multi-sited research design methods, focusing especially on multi-sited ethnography and its critiques. For migration projects, including doctoral studies, multi-sited research designs and mobile field methods enable researchers to ‘follow the people’ as well as other material transfers (such as remittances) and intangible flows (e.g. of discourses, metaphors and images relating to migration). The final section of the chapter illustrates the relevance of context and the suitability of multi-sited research designs with reference to some of the author’s research on Albanian migration.

As academics we increasingly face pressure to prove the impact that our research is having on the wider world. From climate change to demographic explosion, from economic instabilities to ethnic and religious-driven unrest, from rampant right-wing populism to water scarcity and famine – scientists are increasingly expected to work together in an interdisciplinary manner to solve the grand challenges our society is facing. Unfortunately, research that transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries is harder to fund, to conduct, to review and even to publish. Those who attempt it may very well end up struggling for recognition, support and scientific advancement. Combining aspects from a wide range of academic disciplines such as economics, sociology, political science and geography, the study of international migration is deemed to be an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence. But while the coexistence of different perspectives allows to produce a richer body of literature on migration, this chapter highlights cognitive and collaborative challenges associated with interdisciplinary migration research and/or hurdles in the review process that may lead to lower productivity. I argue that while spanning disciplines is beneficial to research because it allows scientists to see connections across fields, in practice it is often penalized due to a lack of interdisciplinarity in academic systems and publication infrastructures.

This chapter proposes a framework for a dialogue between theoretical normative issues and empirical research in migration studies. My point of departure is that political theorists and qualitative researchers are likely to be working in different academic rooms but within the same social science building. Their links, however, have been unexplored. The evaluative character that follows a normative analysis is what is distinctive of political theory, and the identification of themes and patterns of particular migration issues is what is peculiar to qualitative research. Hence, in linking both through an interdisciplinary and scholarly axis, the bridging values become evident. This chapter will underline not only that there are many commonalities between them, but will also concentrate on the benefits they can generate: qualitative research provides political theory with evidence-based and knowledge-based arguments, and political theory provides qualitative research with theoretically-founded arguments within liberal-democratic conceptual frameworks. To develop this particular focus, I propose to follow a conflict-based approach, since it is through conflict analysis that both develop their potentialities. I will argue that this specific focus allows for the inferring of contradictory-practice patterns and the identifying of policy paradoxes within liberal democracy in dealing with migration issues. Then after a section outlining the specificities of conflict and how to focus a conflict-based approach, I will devote the remainder of the chapter to the three main bonding practices of the understanding function: interpreting, conceptualizing and contextualizing.

In this chapter, I discuss some significant limitations of various epistemological approaches which have been linked to qualitative research in general and to qualitative research on migration in particular. More specifically, I discuss the limitations and problems of some versions of interpretivism and social constructionism and propose the integration of useful aspects of them into the critical realist meta-theory. Offering examples from securitization research, the chapter aims at critiquing relativism, and overcoming unfruitful dichotomies such as those between subjectivity and objectivity and between causal explanation and interpretive understanding. Finally, the chapter discusses reflexivity in qualitative migration research, focusing on the issue of methodological nationalism and offering some thoughts of overcoming it within the critical realist premises.

Following a brief review of the epistemological premises informing qualitative methodologies, I identify the key features of qualitative research undertaken in the or interpretative social-science tradition, which render it particularly well suited to capturing the inherent dynamics of the lived experience of human beings in general and, in our case, of immigrants: its multi-dimensionality; its ability to accommodate ambiguity and outright contradictions; its emphasis on the temporality and fluidity of social phenomena; and its insistence on the contextual and situational nature of human perceptions and agency. Next, I argue that the research goals appropriate for qualitative investigations as proposed by Charles Ragin (Constructing social research. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, 1994) – exploring diversity, giving voice, testing/refining theories or guiding concepts, and generating new research questions can be realized by asking questions and gathering answers related to these issues in the context of (im)migrants’ experience. These claims are illustrated with questions asked and answers obtained through three standard methods of qualitative research: interviewing, observation, and document analysis. The examples draw from the current and emerging problem agendas in migration studies. I also discuss the strengths and limitations of research questions probing the complexity and un(der)determinacy of (im)migrants’ lives and the answers they generate.

Categorisation is a central feature and challenge for social scientific research. Particularly in the field of migration studies, critical reflection on potential bias triggered by categorisation, case study selection, comparative designs (or an absence of a comparative design) and analysis methods is of essential importance. Given that political stakes and societal fears with regard to the topic of migration issues are very high, precision and clarity on choices and limitations of choices made in categorisation are very important. In this chapter, largely inspired by the approach taken by King et al. (), who claim that quantitative and qualitative approaches fundamentally need to tackle very similar methodological challenges, I have provided some examples of pitfalls and choices with regard to categorisation and analysis in the field of migrant studies. Acknowledging that qualitative research has its distinctive advantages, I will argue that choices in categorisation, case selection and research design are of crucial importance, perhaps even more in qualitative studies than in quantitative studies, even if in both methodological traditions we are confronted with similar challenges.

Case selection, or sampling, is central for social scientific knowledge production, as the question of which people or incidents to include in a study largely influences the validity and generalization of results. In contrast to random methods of sampling, the purposive character of case selection in qualitative research requires researchers reflecting systematically on which cases to select for their research. Most importantly researchers need to constantly ask themselves: What is the case a case of? Qualitative methodology suggests different strategies to identifying cases which are appropriate for specific research topics, designs and theoretical perspectives. This chapter presents some guidance by cataloguing different types of case selection, i.e. purposive sampling, snowball sampling, theoretical sampling, and matched sampling, and their application in selected empirical studies in migration research. Moreover, this chapter discusses the merits and disadvantages of these methods, in particular in relation to the previously addressed critiques toward migration research, most importantly methodological nationalism and overemphasizing ethnicity.

The interview in its various forms, applications and methods of analysing data remains a central tool in qualitative research. For migration studies, this method has proved indispensable, especially when researching vulnerable groups of people on the move, and collecting data about various aspects of irregularity, grey economic activities, and the autonomy and agency of mobile people. The interview is, however, being increasingly used in policy research, elite research, and to obtain expert opinion in various forms of qualitative research. Interviews are also essential to scholarly endeavours that pursue collaborative knowledge production and participant research. As a method, various forms of interview allow for the unveiling of knowledge which otherwise remains under the radar of formal surveys and other more standardized data collection forms. Additionally, forms such as biographical and life story interviews, or unstructured interviews, generate space for the respondent to actively direct the research inquiry, and for the researcher to map out areas not originally foreseen. Among the most contested aspects of the interview remains its interpretation through processing and presenting the data collected this way. Our chapter will therefore examine examples of exploring ways to present rich data collected through interviews, and discuss its potential for European migration studies.