Watch again: 'Decentering Migration Research'

Posted on 1 November 2021

Our recent webinar, 'Decentering Migration Research: The Challenges of Walking the Talk', is now available to revisit on YouTube.

In the event, Dr Sara de Jong, co-chair of the York Migration Network and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC), chaired a talk by Professor Heaven Crawley who explored the challenges of ‘walking the talk’ when it comes to decentering migration research.

Although migration between the countries of the Global South is increasingly significant in terms of its scale, complexity and consequences, migration research typically focuses on the movement of people to the countries of the Global North reflecting, in significant part, the empirical, political and policy interests of researchers and funding bodies. Drawing on her experiences as Director of the MIDEQ Hub, Professor Heaven Crawley explores the challenges of ‘walking the talk’ when it comes to decentering migration research. MIDEQ is the UK’s largest GCRF-funded project bringing together partners from 12 countries in the Global South to tell a new and very different story of migration and its relationship to inequality.

But this process has been far from straightforward. From pulling together the funding proposal to designing the research, undertaking the data collection and dealing with the fallout from sudden and dramatic funding cuts, the project’s researchers have been in an almost constant tussle with dominant assumptions about what and whose knowledge ‘counts’, how to ensure ‘equitable partnerships’ in the context of deep and long-standing inequalities access to resources for the production of knowledge, and how to address the migration-related inequalities which often stretch beyond borders in contexts where the political focus is on national interests and priorities.

You can view a stream of the event below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ_WLJdkxf0