Migration, Politics and Society Research Cluster

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About us

About us

This interdisciplinary research cluster addresses some of the major issues of the   contemporary world through research and knowledge exchange focussing on:

  • Global Migrations and Social Justice:  migratory movements (family, labour, refugee, return); refugee displacement, protection and settlement; global inequalities and their implications for SDGs and global challenges in UK, Europe and the global South, role of diasporic networks.
  • Labour Migrations and Socio-Economic Inclusion: linking global labour studies and labour migration gendered labour migrations, including skilled migrants, refugee entrepreneurs and modern slavery in the UK and the Global South.
  • Intersectional Discrimination, Minority Communities and Access to Services: legal and socio-economic aspects of individual and institutional discrimination and its intersectional dimensions, especially gender, race, religion, class and sexuality, and in access to services eg. education, health, housing and other services.  

The cluster collaborates with research partners nationally through the Inter-University Migration Network (ARU, Greenwich, Middlesex) and internationally through our membership of IMISCOE (International Migration Research Network).

Our research

Our research

Commissioned by the UK Home Office, FCDO and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Keles, Christou, McDonald, Syrett) £10.000 (2024).

Keles with London Met and UCL, Nuffield Foundation, 2024-2025.

This project aims to improve the effectiveness of Afghan resettlement schemes in England, by generating knowledge of newly arriving Afghan refugees’ experiences and outcomes and using this to inform implementation by regional migration partnerships and Local Authorities (LAs).

Horizon Europe/EU Guarantee Fund UKRI (Kofman, Acik)  2023-2025 (£260.037)

DYNAMIG is a three-year project that aims to create a more thorough understanding of how people make decisions on whether and how to migrate. Focusing on Africa and Europe, we take into account the diversity of migrants’ personal experiences of those planning to leave, in transit and  who have returned in order to shed light on the complexities and challenges of migration and managing migration movements. We seek to contribute to a more nuanced and evidence-based understanding of the diverse trajectories of migration and of policies that impact migration and analyse to what extent the diverse experiences of migrants are taken into consideration when migration policies – or policies that impact migration – are made.

UKRI/AHRC (Kofman, Colucci, Lazzarino) 2024-2027 (£483,175)

The project explores how community assets can be used to improve health, wellbeing and social support that addresses these factors. Examples of community assets include housing, food and support services such as advice and information services, community hubs and groups, religious organisations and open spaces. It researches new ways for these factors to be addressed within integrated health systems that bring together services such as the NHS and local authorities as well as the voluntary sector. We focus on two field sites - Barnet and Islington- working with a number of local community organisations, NGOs and local authorities. In particular we are studying community assets of a number of groups - Afghans, Hong Kongers, Syrians and Ukrainians as well as Iranians and Romanians in Barnet and Italians and Somalis in Islington.

2019-2024 (Kofman, Keles, Raina) (£1.2m)

The Hub’s research comprises 32 projects under six themes: Transformation and Empowerment; Livelihood, Land and Rights; Migration and Displacement; Masculinities and Sexualities; Law and Policy Frameworks and Methodological Innovation, across seven focus countries: Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Uganda. The Hub worked with local and global civil society, practitioners, and researchers to advance gender justice and inclusive peace.  At Middlesex university we focussed on the Migration and Displacement stream with two projects.

Gender Dynamics of International Labour Migration sought to advance a gender-sensitive understanding of the interaction between economic and socio-cultural drivers of labour migrations and the experiences of work and living in different cities: Erbil in Kurdistan-Iraq; Beirut in Lebanon; Islamabad in Pakistan; and Istanbul in Turkey. While migration remains a key issue globally, relatively little work has been done on gendered migrations in the Global South, and what has been done has largely focussed on domestic and care work.

Return, Reintegration and Political Restructuring explored and analysed the gendered experiences of returnees (forced and voluntary) in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It reviewed return policies of the countries under study to understand the possibilities, challenges and obstacles for returnees in the process of participating in re-construction through their human, social and cultural capital.

Culture and Conflict (Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), investigated the value of culture to women in conflict settings, seeking to understand gendered economic exclusion and its relationship to peacebuilding, economic agency and empowerment. It used a cultural mapping methodology to explore how communities of women across different conflict contexts rely on coded and tacit knowledge to rebuild their lives and to understand how cultural practices continue to exist and resist in these challenging contexts.

£10,000 (Keles), 2023

Health, social, economic & cultural impacts of Covid-19 on migrant essential workers in the UK ESRC (Narkowicz, Glasgow and Sheffield Universities), 2020-2023

  • CPD Training for Migrant, Refugee and Community Organisations: a scoping exercise”, Higher Education Innovation Fund (Kofman, Keles, Pizzolato, Saini), 2022
  • The smuggling industry in the Mediterranean: a comparison of countries and across periods (Montagna, Papadouka, Serrantino), 2022
Our members

Our members

The Migration, Politics and Society Research Cluster Co-Leaders are:

  • Janroj Keles, Associate Professor Politics and International Relations
  • Eleonore Kofman, Professor of Gender, Migration and Citizenship
  • Rima Saini, Senior Lecturer Sociology

Other cluster members comprise:

  • Necla Acik, Research Fellow Migration Studies
  • Anastasia Christou, Professor of Sociology and Social Justice
  • Runa Lazzarino, Research Fellow Migration and Health
  • Claudio Morrison, Senior Research Fellow HRM
  • Kasia Narkowicz, Senior Lecturer Criminology
  • Myrna Papadouka, Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Criminology
  • Nico Pizzolato, Associate Professor Global Labour Studies
  • Neelam Raina, Associate Professor Design and Development
  • Leandro Sepulveda Ramirez, Associate Professor Socioeconomic Development
  • Giuseppe Serrantino, Lecturer in Policing
  • Stephen Syrett, Professor Local Economic Development
Our networks

Our networks

The cluster collaborates with many external research partners and works closely with the:
Inter-University Migration Network with Anglia Ruskin and Greenwich Universities. Set up in 2023, it has held two conferences focussing on how academics and a range of organisations can work collaboratively. In 2024 the conference theme was: Working Well Together: forging productive partnerships.

We are an institutional  member of IMISCOE (International  Migration Research Network), the largest network of migration researchers across 69 institutions globally.

We provide the Secretariat for the Afghan Women and Girls All Political Parties Group, UK Parliament.

 

Postgraduate research

Postgraduate research

We welcome doctoral candidates for study in relation to all aspects of migration research and it social, political and economic dimensions.

  • Federica Festa, visiting PhD student 2024-2025 undertaking research in Gender Studies at the University of Palermo. Her doctoral research focuses on gendered migrant flows and reception policies in Italy.

  • Idris Okuduci: “Iran and Turkey’s increasing influence in Kurdistan Region of Iraq amidst the declining of US footprint in Iraq”
  • Ibrahim S Maprok: “The mismanagement of oil revenues by the Libyan investment authority and the economic and social development fund and its impact on the economic development of Libya”
  • Khasro Ajgahi:  “The successful para-diplomacy of Sub-State Actors: The case of Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq”
  • Aein Khezri: “Terrorism from the Perspective of Shia Muslim”

  • Neda Mohamadi: “A curatorial study of migration in arts” (2022)
  • Nefeli Stournara: “‘Paradigmatic workers’: Sociologies of gender, class and ethnicity in the labour experiences of Albanian and ethnic Greek Albanian women cleaners at two Greek public hospitals” (2020)
Research outputs

Research outputs

  • Acik, N., Kutlay-Sarikaya, B., Ghaderi, F. and Kilicaslan, G. 2023. Contextualizing Kurdish gender studies: decolonial feminist knowledge production and the genesis of the Kurdish Gender Studies Network. Kurdish Studies Journal. 1 (1-2), pp. 255-284. https://doi.org/10.1163/29502292-00101012
  • Fox, C., Jo, D., Spencer, J. and Acik, N. 2022. Encountering authority and avoiding trouble: young migrant men’s narratives of negotiation in Europe. European Journal of Criminology. 19 (4), pp. 791-810. https://doi.org/10.1177/147737082092462
  • Pilkington, H. and Acik, N. 2020. Not entitled to talk: (mis)recognition, inequality and social activism of young Muslims. Sociology. 54 (1), pp. 181-198.
    https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038519867630
  • Erel, U. and Acik, N. 2020. Enacting intersectional multilayered citizenship: Kurdish women’s politics. Gender, Place and Culture. 27 (4), pp. 479-501. 
    https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1596883

  • Bönisch-Brednich, B. A. Christou, S. Meyer; M. Karner; A. Escher (eds.) (2024) Narratives of Migration: Modalities of Agency, Collectivity and Performativity, Routledge, London, Routledge.
  • Christou, A. 2022. Theorising Affective Habitus in Historical Geographies of Mobilities: Unfolding Spatio-Temporal Modalities, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2 (6) pp. 215-236. 
  • Christou, A. and Kofman, E. 2022. Gender and Migration: IMISCOE short reader. Cham, Switzerland Springer.
  • Barrios-Aquino, M., N. Chanamuto and A. Christou, A. (2022) Emotions and Mobilities: Gendered, Temporal and Spatial Representations, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2 (6) pp. 201-214.
  • Christou, A. and D. Michail, 2021. ‘A window to knowledge is a window to the world’: Socio-aesthetics, Ethics and Pedagogic Migrant Youth Journeys in Crisis Shaped Educational Settings in Greece, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42(2): 308-322.

  • Keles, Irwani, Acik and  Aghapouri (forthcoming) From the West to the Kurdistan Region: Exploring the Complexities of Gendered Kurdish Return Mobilities. Études Kurdes. 
  • Syrett, S and Keles, J.Y (forthcoming) Homeland and Development, in Routledge Handbook on Home, Edited by Strafford, E and Walsh, K. Routledge, London.
  • Soliman, S., Keles, J. and Fottouh, N. 2023. Refugee entrepreneurship and institutional voids: the case of Syrian refugee entrepreneurs in Egypt. Academy of Management Discoveries. 9 (3), pp. 363-382. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2020.0200
  • Bezwan, N. and Keles, J. 2022. Displacement, diaspora, and statelessness: framing the Kurdish case. in: Mayer, T. and Tran, T. (ed.) Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power London, UK Taylor & Francis (Routledge). pp. 212-224.
  • Vassilopoulou, J., Ozbilgin, M., Groutsis, D. and Keles, J. 2022. Populism as new wine in old bottles in the context of Germany: 'symbolic violence' as collective habitus that devalues the human capital of Turks. Societies. 12 (2). https://doi.org/10.3390/soc12020045
  • Keles, J., Markova, E. and Fatah, R. 2022. Migrants with insecure legal status and access to work: the role of ethnic solidarity networks. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal. 41 (7), pp. 1047-1062. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2018-0203
  • Keles, J. 2022. Return mobilities of highly skilled young people to a post-conflict region: the case of Kurdish-British to Kurdistan – Iraq. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 0, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1600401
  • Bezwan, N. and Keles, J. 2021. Playing politics with the plight of refugees. How the EU went into Erdogan’s political receivership. The Commentaries. 1 (1), pp. 9-15.
     https://doi.org/10.33182/tc.v1i1.1991

  • Bastia, T. and E.  Kofman  forthcoming. Unequal knowledge production and circulation in migration studies: gender and migration: feminist and decolonial perspectives. In  J. Dahinden and A.  Potts (eds) Reflexivities in migration studies: Pitfalls and alternatives, IMISCOE Springer, pp. 85-96
  • Kofman, E. and E. Vacchelli  2024. Temporalities, dependency and the politics of marriage migration’ In K. Le Louvier and Hough (ed) UK Borderscapes, Sites of Enforcement and Resistance ch.4, Routledge.
  • Bechtold, H., Chaya, C., Maydaa, C., Kofman, E., Tuncer, E. and Lazzarino, R. 2022. Gendered dynamics of international labour migration: migrant women in Greater Beirut, Lebanon. London, UK The Gender, Justice and Security Hub. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.25110.01600
  • Kofman, E. 2023. Integration discourses, the purification of gender and interventions in family migrations. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 46 (14), pp. 3037-3057. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2023.2166791
  • Kofman, E. 2021. Gender, migration and policymaking in light of the 60th anniversary of international migration. International Migration. 59 (5), pp. 273 276. 
    https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12918
  • Montagna, N., della Puppa, F. and Kofman, E. 2021. Onward migration: an introduction. International Migration. 59 (6), pp. 8-15. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12882
  • Della Puppa, F., Montagna, N. and Kofman, E. 2021. Onward migration and intra‐European mobilities: a critical and theoretical overview. International Migration. 59 (6), pp. 16 28. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12815
  • Wray, H., Kofman, E. and Simic, A. 2021. Subversive citizens: using free movement law to bypass the UK’s rules on marriage migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 47 (2), pp. 447-463. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1625140
  • Kofman, E. 2020. Unequal internationalisation and the emergence of a new epistemic community: gender and migration. Comparative Migration Studies. 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-020-00194-1
  • D’Angelo, A., Kofman, E. and Keles, J. 2020. Migrants at work: perspectives, perceptions and new connections [Editorial]. Work, Employment and Society. 34 (5), pp. 745-748. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017020946571

  • Lazzarino, R., Kofman, E. and Kapadia, S. 2024. Gendered dynamics of international labour migration: migrant women working in Pakistan. London: The Gender, Justice and Security Hub. https://doi.org/10.60528/112z87
  • Lazzarino, R. and Papadopoulos, R. 2023. Earbuds, smartphones, and music. Spiritual care and existential changes in COVID-19 times. Social Theory & Health. 21 (3), pp. 247-266.  
  • Rousou, E., Apostolara, P., Papadopoulos, R., Kalokairinou, A., Sakellaraki, O., Velonaki, V., Dudau, V., Kuckert, A., Lazzarino, R., Licciardello, O., Mauceri, M., Pezzella, A. and Kouta, C. 2023. Lived experiences of migrant and refugee parents: challenges encountered during their journey and settlement in Europe.
    https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4480888
  • Papadopoulos, R., Lazzarino, R., Sakellaraki, O., Dadãu, V., Apostolara, P., Kuckert-Wöstheinrich, A., Mauceri, M. and Kouta, C. 2022. Empowering refugee families in transit: the development of a culturally competent and compassionate training and support package. Journal of Research in Nursing. 27 (3), pp. 200-214.
    https://doi.org/10.1177/17449871211018736

  • Morrison, C., Sacchetto, D. and Croucher, R. 2020. Migration, ethnicity and solidarity: 'multinational workers' in the former Soviet Union. British Journal of Industrial Relations. 58 (4), pp. 761-784. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12518

  • Gawlewicz A, Narkowicz K, Piekut A, Trevena P and Wright S (2024) ‘They made bets that I’d die’: Impacts of Covid-19 on Polish essential workers in the UK. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 50(2): 442-460.
  • Gawlewicz, A., Narkowicz, K. and Wright, S. 2023. Heroes or villains? Migrant essential workers and combined hostilities of Covid-19 and Brexit. Discover Society: New Series. 3 (2).
  • Narkowicz, K. 2023. White enough, not white enough: racism and racialisation among Poles in the UK. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 46 (6), pp. 1534-1551.
    https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2154913
  • Kumar, M. and Narkowicz, K. 2023. The un-human beings: the denial of Muslim migrants' bodies in India and Poland. Interventions. 25 (4), pp. 413-430. 
    https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099942
  • Narkowicz K and Piekut A (2022) Polish key workers feel unwelcome in the UK thanks to Brexit plus Covid. Open Democracy. November, 16.
  • Ali, N., Phillips, R., Chambers, C., Narkowicz, K., Hopkins, P. and Pande, R. 2020. Halal dating: changing relationship attitudes and experiences among young British Muslims. Sexualities. 23 (5-6), pp. 775-792. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460719850113

  • Raina, N. and Blitz, B. 2021. Afghan Solidarity Coalition - submission to Defence Committee: Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Parliamentary Committee on Defence. 
    Raina, N. 2021. Failing and forgetting Afghanistan. The Gender, Justice and Security Hub. 
  • Raina, N. and Blitz, B. 2021. We tried to get eligible Afghans out of Kabul. British officials did little to help [News article]. Telegraph Media Group Limited. 

  • Saini, R. 2024. Politics, belonging and identity across the British South Asian middle classes: between privilege and prejudice. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Saini, R., Begum, N. and Bankole, M. 2023. Minority ethnic politicians are pushing harsh immigration policies – why representation doesn’t always mean racial justice. The Conversation Trust (UK).
  • Saini, R., Bankole, M. and Begum, N. 2023. The 2022 Conservative leadership campaign and post-racial gatekeeping. Race & Class. 65 (2), pp. 55-74. 
    https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968231164599
  • Saini, R. 2023. The racialised ‘second existence’ of class: class identification and (de- / re-) construction across the British South Asian middle classes. Cultural Sociology. 17 (2), pp. 277-296. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221076388
  • Saini, R. 2022. The racialisation of class and the racialisation of the nation: ethnic minority identity formation across the British South Asian middle classes. South Asian Diaspora. 14 (2), pp. 109-125. https://doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2022.2055518
  • Saini, R. and Begum, N. 2020. Demarcation and definition: explicating the meaning and scope of ‘decolonisation’ in the social and political sciences. The Political Quarterly. 91 (1), pp. 217-221. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12797
  • Begum, N. and Saini, R. 2019. Decolonising the curriculum. Political Studies Review. 17 (2), pp. 196-201. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918808459

  • Khan, M. and Sepulveda Ramirez, L. 2022. Conflict, displacement, and economic revival: the case of the internally displaced minority entrepreneurs in Pakistan. Strategic Change. 31 (4), pp. 461-477. https://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2515

  • Onyima, J., Syrett, S. and Sepulveda Ramirez, L. 2023. Immigrant business in transnational contexts: a multifocal understanding of the breakout process. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research. 30 (1), pp. 155-179. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-02-2023-0190
  • Syrett, S. and Keles, J. 2022. A contextual understanding of diaspora entrepreneurship: identity, opportunity and resources in the Sri Lankan Tamil and Kurdish diaspora. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research. 28 (9), pp. 376-404. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-08-2021-0658
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