Call for contributions: Gendering Migration Infrastructures (IMISCOE Annual Conference 2025)

Following a conference deadline extension, please see below the CfP for the 22nd edition of the IMISCOE 2025 Annual Conference “Decentering Migration Studies” in Paris–Aubervilliers (1-4 July 2025), on Gender and Migration Infrastructures.

Please submit your abstract (max 250 words) and a short bio to Gaja Maestri (g.maestri@aston.ac.uk) by Monday 1 October 2024 (23:59 CEST).

This session interrogates the gendered dimension of international migration through the lens of ‘infrastructure’. In the last decade the concept of ‘migration infrastructure’ has gained traction in migration studies. Defined as the “systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility” (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, p.S124), migration infrastructures include formal and informal commercial agencies (e.g., visa brokers or smugglers), regulatory frameworks (e.g., state policies, border controls, bilateral agreements), ICTs and transports, humanitarian support (e.g., NGOs), and social networks (Düvell and Preiss 2022).

A migration infrastructure approach overcomes simplistic micro- and macro-sociological explanations of migration, capturing its complexity as an event that materialises thanks to a more-than-human assemblage (McCormack 2017, Xiang and Lindquist 2014). This approach is also particularly fruitful in analysing contemporary migration, which is characterised by an increasingly easier international labour mobility, on the one hand, and an intensification of migration regulations, on the other. This tension has led to a proliferation of intermediaries, who offer paid services facilitating migration and who nowadays attract a considerable portion of migrants’ financial resources (De Haas, Castles and Miller 2019).

Although gender is often mentioned as a variable that critically shapes the access to and effects of migration infrastructure (Meeus, van Heur and Arnaut 2019, Wessendorf 2022), it has rarely been explicitly and systematically investigated. This session aims to develop a gendered perspective on migration infrastructures through a series of papers addressing, although not necessarily limited to, the following topics:

• How individuals/groups occupying different gendered social locations strategically navigate migration infrastructures;
• Effects of migration infrastructures on individuals/groups occupying different gendered social locations;
• How gender is negotiated and changes throughout migration infrastructures;
• The gendered dimension of migration infrastructures (e.g., commercial brokers and smugglers, regulations, social networks);
• How minoritised and silenced gendered groups experience migration infrastructures (e.g., migrant mothers, unaccompanied minors, LGBTQ+);
• How gender interacts with other categories (e.g., race, class, age) in shaping how migrants navigate migration infrastructures.

Because of its explorative nature, this CFP is open to work conducted on different forms of international migration, including labour, family and forced migration.

References
De Haas, H., Castles, S., & Miller, M. J. (2019). The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Düvell, F., & Preiss, C. (2022). Migration infrastructures: How do people migrate. In Scholten, P. (ed.). Introduction to Migration Studies: An Interactive Guide to the Literatures on Migration and Diversity, pp. 83-98, Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
McCormack, D. P. (2017). Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(3), 418-437.
Meeus, B., Arnaut, K., & Van Heur, B. (2019). Arrival infrastructures. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Xiang, B., & Lindquist, J. (2014). Migration infrastructure. International migration review, 48, S122-S148.
Wessendorf, S. (2022). ‘The library is like a mother’: Arrival infrastructures and migrant newcomers in East London. Migration Studies, 10(2), 172-189.