And welcome to Migration Mobilities Bristol! For those of you who do not know us yet we are a Specialist Research Institute at the University of Bristol. We comprise a network of academics, practitioners and others who are interested in human movement and who want to expand and challenge understandings of mobility in order to contribute to a more just world. You can find out more about us here.
There’s been a longstanding interest in migration at Bristol, nurtured by colleagues like Katharine Charsley and Jon Fox for years before I came here, and later Julia O’Connell Davidson and Chris Bertram. It’s been very exciting working with people to think about our next steps. This has been a genuinely interdisciplinary effort, with lots of different faculties contributing, and our fantastic advisory board includes people from History, English, Geography, Philosophy, Social Sciences, Film and Television Studies and Law.
How to research migration?
We’ve developed a set of four research challenges with a view to helping us to enrich the study of migration through making unexpected connections, and to demonstrate to non-migration scholars and policymakers just how important migration is. This is critical work because while we have seen a massive increase in research on migration the movement of some people continues to be scapegoated and demonised, their journeys becoming ever more dangerous and their attempts to successfully claim asylum ever more difficult. For academics this means we must grapple with how to research ‘migration’ without contributing to the construction of the strongly imagined problem ‘migrant’? I’ll do a quick plug here for the MSc Migration and Mobility Studies which is a fantastic course for people who want to think critically and about migration and migration policies, and learn new research skills.
New thinking
This blog contributes to our ambition to promote new thinking on people and movement. We hope that it will showcase research and good practice and be a space where you can make unexpected connections and try out ideas.
We don’t only need good news stories so let’s be unafraid to share our learning from mistakes and wrong turns. We want to challenge the boundaries between theory and practice, between the university and practitioners, between citizens and non-citizens, so please, feel free to join in the conversations and contribute to this blog series.
Get in touch – mmb-sri@bris.ac.uk
By Bridget Anderson
Bridget is Director of Migration, Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship. Her post is split between the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies