Knowledge, Power, and Migration

Challenging global inequalities in immigration research while generating important findings for policymakers, immigrant-serving organizations, and migrant advocates.

Knowledge, Power, and Migration asks how research practices can change the conversation on immigration, encouraging curiosity about how scholarship in this field can shape global, social, and epistemic justice.

As the field of migration studies has grown, the asymmetrical relationship between researchers in the Global North and in the South has produced a body of work that centres the concerns of the former. Those from the Global North and wealthier countries continue to produce the greater portion of this research, while research from Global South scholars with lived experiences as migrants is received as anecdotal or too niche to have universal application.

Knowledge, Power, and Migration assembles researchers from across the divide to question the ways in which research practices can change the conversation on immigration. It encourages a necessary curiosity about how scholarship in the field can shape global, social, and epistemic justice. Migration is a constant in human history, but the sharp decline in permanent resettlement options, increasingly selective criteria, and violent enforcement measures of the twenty-first century constitute a crisis of immigration policy. Only by redressing the inequalities it shares with global governance structures can the discipline confront this historic challenge.

Research on immigration can occasion reflections and practices that challenge epistemic injustices. Knowledge, Power, and Migration contributes to this ongoing project while offering insights on the practical organization of new forms of dialogue on migration in a largely unequal world.