UE241 - De-centering migration: approaches from the Global South

Intervenant·e·s

• Camille Schmoll [référent·e]   directrice d'études, EHESS / Géographie-cités (GÉOCIT)

Ce séminaire en anglais s'inscrit dans le cadre du cycle de séminaire EUMIGS (partenariat Erasmus). Il est réservé aux étudiant·es du master Migrations et aura lieu en hybride.

The process of critical reflection that migration studies have been undergoing for a few years now calls for a greater commitment to de-centering the scholarly gaze and the ways in which knowledge is produced. This process is guided by postcolonial and decolonial critiques of Western (and even Westernising) and Eurocentric character of migration research, as well as the hegemony of the global North both in the focus of research and spaces in which contributions to this field are produced (Grosfoguel et al., 2015). From this paradigm, the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 1999) is criticised and either the inclusion of a greater diversity of knowledge, especially the peripheral (Višić and Ćosić, 2020) and subalternized (Spivak, 1985), or a refocusing of academic interest on the Global South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020) is called for. This includes a departure from the pervasiveness of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and ethnicity-centred epistemologies (Dahinden 2016) in migration studies. This directs the study of mobility from migration as a ‘disruptor’ of the bounded homogenous nation state (Anderson 2019) to transnational understandings of mobility and the global systems that engenders them, as well as de-centred, re-scaled, and de-migranticised understandings of governance, policy, and other objects of analysis.

The EuMIGS lecture series for the 2025/2026 academic year aims to address this debate in terms of epistemic justice in migration studies and therefore invites proposals for lectures, whether epistemological or methodological, theoretical or empirical.

EuMIGS Lecture Series 2025

Contemporary Issues in Migration Studies: De-Centering Migration - Approaches from the Global South

13 October : Ibrahima Konate, Missing Voices (REER): Epistemic Injustice and Border Externalization: African Perspectives on Migration Governance

This lecture will focus on the colonial continuities embedded in European migration governance and their impact on mobility in Africa. Drawing on my personal experience as a migrant and the collective knowledge produced with returnees and families of missing migrants through the Missing Voices (REER) project, I will discuss how border externalization policies such as Frontex operations and bilateral agreements shape everyday life in Senegal and West Africa. Situating these dynamics within postcolonial and decolonial critiques of migration studies, I will highlight how Eurocentric frameworks often marginalize African perspectives while legitimizing restrictive migration regimes. The lecture will advocate for recentring subaltern voices and lived experiences, both in academic debates and policymaking, in order to challenge methodological nationalism and promote epistemic justice in migration research.

Essential readings:

• Grosfoguel, R. (2007). THE EPISTEMIC DECOLONIAL TURN: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 211–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162514
• Walker, M., Boni, A. (2020). Epistemic Justice, Participatory Research and Valuable Capabilities. In: Walker, M., Boni, A. (eds) Participatory Research, Capabilities and Epistemic Justice.Pp. 1-25. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56197-0_1

20 October : Stefan Jonsson, Linköping University: Eurafrica. A Case of Demographic Colonialism

African partnership model built on equality and mutual ‘win-win’ dynamics, a closer look at the history of EU-African migration reveals striking parallels between past and present. Throughout the period from the 1920s and onward, the migration policies devised within various frameworks of European integration have been shaped by demographic projections. Each time demography has governed European migration policy vis-à-vis Africa, what has first been introduced as a mutual interest has quickly been transformed into a geopolitical relationship, where one partner has channeled migration to its own benefit.

Essential readings:

• Hansen, Peo and Stefan Jonsson (2011) “Demographic Colonialism: EU–African Migration Management and the Legacy of Eurafrica”. Globalizations, 8:3 (2011): 261–276.
• Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe (2005) Africa: The Changing Meanings of an ”African” Culture and Identity. In Horizons: Perspectives on a Global Africa, edited by Elisabeth Abri and Håkan Thörn. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 31–72.

For reference:

• Hansen, Peo and Stefan Jonsson (2014) Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism. London: Bloomsbury. Open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/58764

27 October : Xolani Tshabalala, Linköping University: “Survival takes precedence!”: Mobility, enforcement, and uncertainty across South Africa’s land borders during the Corona global pandemic.

At the peak of Covid-19 lockdowns in Southern Africa, possibilities for cross-border travel became severely restricted. Apart from lifesaving goods, medicines, and the dead, virtually all transportation and human mobility was summarily suspended before being gradually reintroduced as the pandemic progressed. Using ideas around ‘dead time’, intentionality, and necropolitics, this lecture explores how blanket restrictions on mobility as a means of reducing infections and preserving lives in fact had the opposite effect of congesting mobility and inducing counter-intuitive practices of crossing especially the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. For a region whose economies are built around an extensive regional migrant labour system, anxiety and economic deprivation resulting from pandemic-related restrictions on mobility fed onto a long-standing production of migrant vulnerabilities that the pandemic merely deepened.

Essential readings:

• Moris, J. C. (2023). Necropolitics as accumulation: Enforcement and enclosure in Brisbane during COVID-19, Political Geography 102, pp. 1–11.
• Mbembe, A. and Roitman, J. (1995). Figures of the subject in times of crisis. Public Culture 7, pp 323–352.

Optional reading:

• De Genova, N. (2022). Viral Borders: Migration, Deceleration, and the Re-Bordering of Mobility during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Communication, Culture and Critique, 15(2), pp 139–156

3 November : Luciana Denardi, San Martin National University & CONICET: The role of Chinese migrants in the anchorage of Chinese extraterritorial policies in Argentina

The largest flow of Chinese migrants began arriving in Argentina approximately 40 years ago. Initially, it was a diaspora divided between those from China and those from Taiwan, but it became more heterogeneous over the decades. This was partly due to new Chinese migration flows, but also due to the growing ties between China and Argentina, called by many specialists in Economy and International Relations studies "South-South cooperation." In this context, migrants began to develop several strategies to take on a relevant role in bilateral relations. On this regard, the research presented here aims to analyze the role of migrants as fundamental pieces of the anchoring of Chinese extraterritorial practices in Argentina. To achieve this, they build transnational networks between migrants and non-migrants, Chinese and non-Chinese actors, with the goal of promoting Chinese investment in Argentina, generating business deals that increase their economic capital, and positioning them politically within the Chinese state. To this end, qualitative methodology has been implemented, based mainly on ethnographic fieldwork in the City of Buenos Aires between 2022 and 2025, semi-structured interviews, and analysis of journalistic documents. To facilitate this type of analysis, an anthropological approach to the State will be used to analyze Chinese state policies towards the diaspora. The objective is to challenge the idea present in the media, academic studies from other disciplines, and the common sense of Argentines that the Chinese state is an organized and homogeneous entity. Furthermore, transnational studies will be combined with Actor-Network Theory to present the case of a network constructed for enhance Chinese lithium investment in Argentina.

Essential readings:

• Lau, N., & Denardi, L. (2024). China’s Diaspora Policy Implications for Overseas Chinese in Peru and Argentina. Diaspora Studies, 18(2), 132-155. https://doi.org/10.1163/09763457-bja10137
• Chen, W. K. (2021). Harnessing the sending state: Pragmatic improvisations and negotiated memberships of the Chinese diaspora in Laos. Political Geography, 89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102425

10 November : Nandita Dutta, University of Osnabrück: Climate Change and Migration: Mapping the Field

This lecture will provide an overview of the field of climate migration from a postcolonial perspective. It will discuss the contemporary debates on the nexus of climate change and migration, the dominant spatial and scientific imaginaries that animate the field, the epistemological challenges of knowing climate migration as well as what the field would look like from a climate and mobility justice perspective.

Essential readings:

• Baldwin, A. (2013). Racialisation and the Figure of the Climate-Change Migrant. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 45(6), 1474–1490. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45388
• Ferdaoussi, N. (2024, March). Climate as border. Africa Is a Country. https://africasacountry.com/2024/03/climate-as-border

17 November : Yasmina Ortiga, Singapore Management University: Looking beyond the “Left-behind”: Immobility, Emigration, and the Source Country Perspective

This lecture invites students to critically examine two persistent biases in migration studies: 1) an overfocus on destination country concerns such as immigrant integration; and 2) a tendency to only study those who successfully move across international borders. Drawing on case studies from source nations in Asia, the lecture explores how attention to issues of emigration sheds light on how both states and migrants define the meaning of cross-border movement.
Students will engage with current research on immobility and discuss how aspiring migrants navigate the process of leaving amid increasing costs and barriers within their own countries. Moving beyond mainstream portrayals of source countries as passive or “left behind,” this lecture underlines the need to reframe global migration, not simply as a matter of regulating movement, but also as a process of negotiating the meaning and implications of remaining in place.

Essential readings:

• Ortiga, Yasmin Y. 2025. Stuck at Home: Pandemic Immobilities in the Nation of Emigration. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Introduction]
• Chan, Carol. 2017. “In between Leaving and Being Left behind: Mediating the Mobilities and Immobilities of Indonesian Non-Migrants.” Global Networks 17(4):554–73. doi:10.1111/glob.12161.

24 November : Celio Sierra-Paycha, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, & Anna Perraudin, University of Tours: Reflexive Insights from a Research Project on Migratory Circulations and Urban Change in Quito and Bogotá

The aim of this presentation is to offer a reflexive account of a research project on migratory circulations and urban change in two metropolises of the Global South, highlighting our research design and reflecting on our position as researchers from the Global North working in a Southern field site. The project focused on a working-class neighborhood in the south of Quito, Ecuador, shaped by multiple migratory dynamics (emigration to Spain and the United States, Colombian and Venezuelan immigration), as well as a middle-class neighborhood in the southern pericenter of Bogotá, Colombia, characterized by its more limited connections to international mobility (residence of Ecuadorian families, emigration to the United States and Europe, low Venezuelan presence). We will revisit the research design and the precautions taken to limit North/South asymmetries in the field and in the production of transnational knowledge.

Essential readings

• David Lessault, Brenda Le Bigot, Marème Niang, Sébastien Fleuret, Mohamadou Samb, Caroline Cira, Papa Sakho, Ndeye Fatou Sarr and Jordan Pinel, “Enquêter en terrain cosmopolite au Sénégal”, Carnets de géographes [Online], 18 | 2024, Online since 09 December 2024, connection on 29 September 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cdg/10795; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12sv1
• Herrera Gioconda and Gómez Carmen (2022), « Emergent issues of South American Migrations », in Migration in South America. Springer- IMISCOE. Serie Regional Migration, pp.1-25.

1 December : Lorena Izaguirre, UCLouvain: Unpacking Coloniality from the South: Gendered Intimacies and Migrant Labor in São Paulo

This lecture explores how colonial hierarchies of race, class, gender, and geography are mobilized within intimate, co-ethnic networks to legitimize labor exploitation in migration contexts. I draw on the case of Peruvian migrants working in São Paulo’s artisanal workshops—spaces that function simultaneously as homes and workplaces. In these workshops, exploitation is sustained not only through material dependence but also through the instrumentalization of affective ties such as loyalty, gratitude, and obligation. Building on Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power and María Lugones’s work on the coloniality of gender, I develop the concept of “affective contracts” to capture how unwritten emotional obligations naturalize inequality, particularly for Indigenous women.
The lecture shows how recruitment practices, dependent mobilities, and overlapping family and work relations are embedded in intimate mechanisms of control. While framed through the Peruvian case, the findings speak more broadly to South–South migration, where historical hierarchies of coloniality continue to shape how difference and exploitation are negotiated. By centering intimacy as a key site of labor politics, the lecture contributes to decentering migration studies and highlights how colonial continuities operate in everyday migrant lives across the so-called Global South.

Essential reading:

• Izaguirre, L., Bastia, T., Walsham, M. et al. Neglected intersections: a view from the South. CMS 13, 45 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00456-w

8 December : Sargam Goundar, University of Otago: Demystifying Climate Mobility in Oceania

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the most challenging contemporary environmental issues, reshaping how and where people live. Due to their high vulnerability and exposure to climate risks, people living in Oceania have often been portrayed as ‘climate refugees’, and Pacific Island countries have been predominantly framed as ‘migration outlets’. However, how accurate are these mainstream depictions? This lecture aims to unpack Northern-centric (mis-)understandings of climate change and migration in Oceania from a Pacific-centred perspective. After introducing the Pacific Islands region with its 22 Pacific Island countries and territories, the lecture will discuss key academic debates and critical gaps in the climate mobility literature in Oceania and beyond. Focusing on movements between Pacific Island countries, the lecture highlights the so far overlooked realities of Pacific Islands as receiving countries of climate-related migrants. Overall, the lecture fosters a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the climate change-migration nexus in Oceania, questioning orthodox climate migration thinking. This could lead into a class discussion and reflections about lessons for other regions in the Global South.

Essential readings:

• Goundar, S. (2023). Should foreign aid consider inter-Pacific Islands migration in the context of climate change? Evidence from Fiji. Development Policy Review, 00:e12742. https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.12742
• Wiegel H, Boas I, Warner J. A. (2019). Mobilities perspective on migration in the context of environmental change. WIREs Clim Change, 10: e610. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.610

15 December : Madina Tlostanova, Linköping University: What can and cannot be decolonized? Unsettlement as a generative stance

The current urge to decolonize museums, universities, disciplines, or states is understandable yet ultimately doomed because following Audre Lorde, dismantling of the master´s house is never done with the help of master`s tools, and if we are not changing the “terms of the conversation” but only its context we will never accomplish the task of decolonization. Before we even attempt to decolonize migration studies or enrich them with global south perspectives it is necessary to critically address our deeply engrained modern/colonial delusions and hang-ups that prevent us from perceiving the world outside and beyond the dichotomous framings of sameness and otherness, marked by identificational territoriality and agonistics that are masking the long-going and increasing alienation from the world and from ourselves as the main symptom of modernity. We will trace together how decolonial academic thought has claimed to provide a radical critique of modernity while often continuing to reproduce its conceptual aberrations and romanticize the trivialized tropes of indigenous and anticolonial agency. In many cases this has led away from nurturing a political imagination for refuturing and from thinking in terms of the communities of survival in which the predominant oppositions of belonging and exclusion, of the settled and unsettled would stop making any sense

Essential readings:

• Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Hospicing Modernity. North Atlantic Books, 2021. Pp. 29–40, 215–232.
• Madina Tlostanova. Of birds and trees: Rethinking decoloniality through unsettlement as a pluriversal human condition. Echo 2. 2020. https://doi.org/10.15162/2704-8659/1205
• Vilna Bashi. The Practice of Decolonizing Migration Studies. Sociological Forum. 20 July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12916

5 janvier et 12 janvier : séances de travail collectif autour des interventions