Panels & Roundtables

The papers selected for this panel will examine how immigrant civil society organizations (ICSOs) shape social integration, civic engagement, and political participation in an era of intensified restriction and contestation around diversity and inclusion in Europe, the Nordic countries, and beyond. Focusing on immigrant CSOs as organizations situated between the state and immigrant communities, the panel explores how these organizations navigate collaboration with state and municipal actors, welfare institutions, and political parties, and how these interactions create both opportunities and obstacles for inclusive democratic participation of immigrants.

Methodologically, the panel aims to bring together qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research that takes different angles on immigrant civil society organizations - for example, case studies of ICSOs engaged in state-funded collaboration; interview-based studies with foreign-born politicians and activists with strong links to ICSOs; analyses of local partnership arrangements between ICSOs, schools, community police, and social services; and investigations of how ICSOs operate in different local contexts, including rural settings and stigmatized urban neighborhoods.

ICSOs are an important topic for research for many reasons. First, ICSOs can offer organizational supports, networks, and interpretive resources that help migrants navigate institutions and claim rights. Second, collaboration regimes and organizational gatekeeping can simultaneously instrumentalize or tame ICSOs, limiting their capacity to articulate contentious claims or challenge racialized hierarchies and group boundaries. Third, ICSOs’ impacts are profoundly shaped by intersectional dynamics of gender, class, religion, and generation, revealing uneven opportunities for participation and leadership that can have broader social impacts.

This panel theme speaks directly to the conference theme by situating ICSOs at the heart of everyday multicultural governance: as actors that mediate between local communities and authorities, contest hostile discourses, and experiment with new forms of solidarity—yet also operate under intensifying surveillance, conditionality, and expectations of “responsibilized” integration. By focusing on ICSOs, the panel hopes to advance scientific understanding of immigrant civil society organizations, and offer empirically grounded insights for scholars and practitioners seeking more just and collaborative infrastructures for immigrants' civic participation and social integration.

Contact: andrea.voyer@sociology.su.se

In present-day public realms affected by discourses of essentialized cultural threats, research is needed to highlight overlaps and transgressions of boundaries, including the conceptual boundary of ethnicity. Promoting the understanding of culture as praxis, this panel seeks to highlight existing practices of people who may not share an ethnic affiliation but engage in common cultural productions and performances, presenting, mixing, or creatively fusing diverse traditions.

The panel focuses on Nordic cultural practitioners – both professional and amateur – with and without experience of migration, who engage in non-ethnic collaborations. For instance, ‘world music’ educational and performative contexts in Sweden include Arab, Armenian, Afghan, Balkan, and other influences, fostering experimentation within different ensembles. These collaborations generate new cultural expressions by mixing aesthetic elements embedded in various traditions, including Swedish ones. Platforms such as The Baghdad Sessions, Mix Musik, and Evolving Traditions, along with ensembles such as Nordic Raga, Mazguf, Tarabband, Tango Primo and Cloud Atlas Trio, exemplify the kinds of collaborations this panel seeks to explore.

The panel invites both theoretical and empirical contributions that examine creative non-ethnic collaborations in the performance arts within public – including virtual – spaces across the Nordic countries. Key questions include: Who participates in these collaborations, and what motivates them? Where and how do such collaborations emerge, and what roles do institutions and policies play? How do practitioners navigate obstacles and power relations in the context of non-ethnic collaborations? How are their performances staged and artistic works circulated? Who constitutes their audiences, and how are these collaborations perceived?

Case studies are welcome – even if at an initial stage – that address institutional and informal educational contexts, professional and amateur musical ensembles, theatre or dance groups, that do not tick the multicultural boxes for representation of ethnic identities but explore new grounds for creativity.

Rather than relying on notions of bounded or inherited sets of cultural traits, the practices discussed in this panel can provide empirical momentum for new narratives of self-understanding – of individuals, groups, and societies. They can also help us to critically examine ideas of integration and multiculturalism that rely on the majority/minority divide. Circumventing this analytical divide is essential for understanding cultural change in societies impacted by migration, facilitated by shared interests and joint expertise beyond notions of majority or minority heritage.

Contact: maja.frykman@mau.se

Co-convenors: Irma Mačkiné (Vilnius University), Svitlana Odynets (Vilnius University & Mid University of Sweden)

In this panel we invite researchers who are/have been involved in empirical research and theoretical conceptualisations on circulation of care in migrant contexts and in local as well as transnational welfare settings. Our focus is on care arrangements (both digital and physical) directed to elderly people who are dependent on other people´s care in their daily life. We are interested in care arrangements from the perspectives of either the elderly, their informal or formal care givers, or professional care. The elderly person in need of care and the caregivers, could either be among those who have migrated or among those who is left in the country of origin.

We invite papers that reflect on how political and institutional settings in a specific historical time interact with the needs and capacities of the caregiving network situated in transnational welfare settings.

In this panel we wish to deepen our theoretical and empirical understanding about how care is done, arranged, facilitated, restricted and felt by those parties who are involved. The actors may be informal as well as formal and situated at a distance from the elderly person or in proximity.

Contact: charlotte.melander@socwork.gu.se

Co-convenors: Linda Bäckman (Migration Institute of Finland)

Across the Nordic countries, official language proficiency has become a central criterion for access to rights, employment, education, long-term residence and citizenship. Recently, public debates have hardened, narrowing definitions of national identity and increasingly framing migrants through deficit-based tropes such as “foreign background,” “lack of integration,” or “disadvantaged communities.” On the background of these tendencies, migrants and minority groups continue to affirm their rights of belonging and participation, and negotiate spaces in schools, workplaces, and local communities. Language learning and utilisation of the linguistics repertoires becomes a social and relational process through which migrants participate in community life, affirm their identity and transform their environments.

This panel invites contributions that explore how multilingualism, language learning, and everyday encounters shape migrants’ experiences and opportunities for participation and collaboration in an era of increasingly restrictive migration regimes. It aims to discuss how linguistic resources, official language learning policies, and informal multilingual practices intersect with migrants’ agency and communities’ experiences of belonging.

We encourage submissions that explore cases where language barriers create friction between migrants and institutions, but also instances of dialogue, interpretation, peer support networks, and community-led initiatives which generate new forms of solidarity. In doing so, the panel highlights how utilisation of multilingualism, linguistic resources and community support can be a resource for resilience. Such studies can examine how:

• Families use translanguaging practices to mediate between home languages and Nordic languages
• Adult learners balance workplace expectations and integration policies
• Schools, community organisations, religious centres, and local authorities become crucial actors in shaping multilingual pathways to inclusion
• Local or transnational initiatives of language teaching and learning are created as a form of resistance
• Multilingual practices constitute integral components of everyday social interaction across diverse institutional and informal settings

The panel will thus offer a comparative Nordic perspective that foregrounds migrant agency and multilingual practices as an essential aspect for understanding collaboration, belonging, and inclusion in restrictive times.

Contact: zahova@hi.is

Co-convenors: Rikke Skovgaard Nielsen (Aalborg University), Nicolina Ewards Öberg (Linköping University)

Across the Nordic countries, neighbourhoods are becoming political battle fields. On the one hand, migration, integration and housing policies are increasingly restrictive and intertwined through policies which target multi-ethnic neighbourhoods labelled as ‘vulnerable’ or ’parallel societies’, suggesting their non-belonging to the nation. On the other hand, place-based struggles emerge within these neighbourhoods, challenging the discourses, legal frameworks and implementation of policies (Söderberg 2024; Stender et al. 2025). While this tendency results in conditions of evictability for targeted groups across Europe (van Baar 2016), the ways in which the policies are carried out vary across different settings. This calls for research which explores how this tendency plays out in similar and different ways in the Nordic countries, which barriers and opportunities for collaborations that emerges, and the consequences on both individual, neighbourhood and societal scale. These consequences range from physical and cultural displacement, community disruption and neighbourhood conflicts to decreasing societal cohesion and politics of fear.

This panel welcomes contributions of different methodological, theoretical and geographical perspectives (with the focus on the Nordic region), dealing with a broad spectrum of topics related to the entanglement of migration, integration and housing policies and the lived experiences of those affected. We welcome both empirically and theoretically oriented papers. Topics could range from migration policies, settlement of refugees, dispersal-, anti-segregation-, and social mix policies. Papers in this panel may include, but are not limited to, research on:

• The multicultural society. How and by what mechanisms do non-migration political areas—such as welfare politics and housing politics—become part of migration politics? And what are the consequences of entangled policy fields for discourses, demographics and society as a whole?
• Embodied and emotional consequences. How are policies which targets homes and neighbourhoods experienced in everyday life?
• Resistance and collaborations. How are people building networks and collaborations across different backgrounds, actors and scales? Which conflicts arise, between which groups and with which consequences?

Contact: rsod@kglakademi.dk

Co-convenors: Serde Atalay, Lovisa Häckner Posse, Maria Persdotter

Over the past decade, residential segregation – particularly ethnic segregation – has become a central concern in both civil and public law across the Nordic countries. The most well-known example is probably the Danish “Ghetto Law,” a package of legislation aimed at transforming areas designated as “parallel societies”, allowing the state to demolish apartment blocks in areas where at least half of the residents are categorized as having “non-Western” background. In Sweden, several legislative changes have recently been introduced or are proposed with the explicit aim of addressing segregation and/or exclusion through the regulation of housing. Such regulations include re-configuring access to housing benefits, regulating the provision of housing by public authorities, or seeking norm-conforming behaviour through housing. We are thus witnessing how segregation is being increasingly ‘juridified’, grounding various legislative interventions in the areas of crime, welfare, and migration.

There are numerous historical examples of de jure segregation—from the Jewish ghetto of late medieval Rome to U.S. Jim Crow laws, as well as South African and Israeli apartheid. What we are seeing in the Nordic region today is arguably a re-juridification of segregation, in which various social and spatial control measures are mobilised in the housing sphere, ostensibly to counteract segregation but in practice disproportionately and negatively affecting migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and people originating from outside the West (“ethnic minorities”).

This session will explore the ’(re-)juridification’ of segregation in the Nordic region. Although there is a substantial body of research on segregation and anti-segregationist measures in the Nordics, a legal perspective is largely missing from this scholarship. This panel attempts to address this gap by focusing on the legal aspects of segregation. Specifically, the panel aims to problematize how segregation acts as a rationale for the legislator and other actors to mobilise various forms of law in the areas of crime, welfare, and migration through the medium of housing.

We invite proposals that examine the links between law, residential segregation, and social control in the Nordic countries. Potential topics to be addressed include but are not limited to the way in which segregation is presented as a legislative rationale for different measures in migration law, criminal law and welfare policies; the effects of (anti-)segregationist measures on migrants and ethnic minorities; the interaction of segregation with human rights under domestic, international and European law.

Contact: alezini.loxa@jur.lu.se

Co-convenors: Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland (Bergen University), Hans Lucht (Danish Institue for International Studies)

In recent years we have seen a lot of creative methods and co-creations in migration research. The interest in “experimental collaborations” (Estalella et al. 2018) has been part of a larger movement towards decolonising research and democratising knowledge. Despite new media platforms and forms of dissemination our primary means of research communications is still writing. In general writing is a kind of worldmaking where characters, relationships, feelings and affect, but also power structures, bureaucracy and forms of resistance are conveyed, imagined and experimented with. In this respect writing is a way to engage with epistemological and ontological aspects of reality.

In this panel we invite papers that discuss experimental and creative forms of writing (e.g. poetry, prose, autobiography, scifi, graffiti, blog posts, etc.) as an ingrained aspect of the research methodology and / or output, particularly (but not exclusively) as part of collaborative projects. What is the relation between analysis and form, and the potential of different forms in producing new analytical insights? How can writing be a form of engaged research? How can writing mobilise individuals or maybe entire communities? What critical potential is there in more creative forms of writing and representation in an increased restrictive Europe characterized by expanding border regimes, ethno-nationalism, racism, deportation and externalization.

Contact: mikkel.rytter@cas.au.dk

Co-convenors: Martin Lundqvist (Lund University)

The five Nordic states — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — are often praised for their high levels of digitalisation. Indicatively, in the 2025 IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking all five Nordic states are ranked in the global top 20 (IMD 2025), whereas the Global Digitalization Index 2024 (GDI 2024) ranks four out of five Nordic states in the global top 20. The Nordic countries have historically been open to migration to varying degrees, which is reflected in their current demographic compositions. Iceland is composed of roughly 21% migrants; Sweden 20.6%; Norway 18.4%; Denmark 14%, and Finland 9.3% (Eurostat 2024). Due to various digital, linguistic, social, and legal barriers, migrants in the Nordic countries struggle with labour market access, de-skilling, and brain waste (Lighthouse Reports 2024). This is particularly problematic seeing as there is a strong connection between employment and integration, as often stated in the migration studies literature (e.g., Heckmann and Schnapper 2003, van Riejmsdijk 2023). Thus, the matter of ensuring that migrants are able to secure gainful employment is of utmost importance in the Nordic countries, who are all facing this challenge, albeit to varying degrees. Considering the strong digitalisation of the Nordic countries, one wonders to what extent this may impact migrants’ ability to find employment. Indeed, this is the core analytical focus of this panel, which seeks to bring together scholars working on digitalisation and automation of public services regarding migration and unemployment, migrants’ utilisation of digital and AI technologies/tools to seek jobs in the Nordic countries. In doing so, we aim to get a better sense of the current state of the art in this matter, as well as to build bridges between research endeavours in the five Nordic countries. The panel seeks contributions relating to the question: to what extent does the high level of digitalisation in the Nordic countries help (or hinder) migrants’ labour market inclusion? We especially invite papers which dwell on the following topics within the Nordic context:

• How do public, non-profit and private sectors experience digitalisation and automation in relation to migration and (un)employment?
• What kinds of digital media, social media, digital tools, AI tools, do migrants use to seek jobs, for networking, and/or to build skills to enter the job market?
• What kinds of barriers and challenges do migrants face in entering the labour market, particularly in relation to digital systems and requirements?

Contact: deniz.duru@iko.lu.se

Co-convenors: Bilal Almobarak (Support Group Network), Junior Goméz Manresa (Jönköping University)

As migration scholars we have a common desire to better understand the drivers, processes and consequences of people relocating and settling in new environments (Scholten, Pisarevskaya & Levy, 2022). However, dominant research practices often result in research ‘on’ rather than ‘with’ migrants (Fiorito, 2024; Rydzik, Pritchard, Morgan & Sedgley, 2013). Such research can contribute to the reproduction and exacerbation of the marginalisation and inequalities migration research often aims to address (Fiorito, 2024). Participatory research methods that prioritise co-creation can minimise the reproduction of stereotypes, misrepresentation and marginalisation of migrants (Fiorito, 2024). Co-creation involves various stakeholders bringing their different experiences, perspectives and understandings together to generate new knowledge and solutions (Larruina & Ghorashi, 2020). A core component of co-creation is the involvement of the client or end-user of the policies (Larruina & Ghorashi, 2020) products or services. In the case of co-creation in migration research, the involvement of the migrants whose experiences are at the centre of the enquiry is critical (Fiorito, 2024). Therefore, co-creation is a form of participation that minimises power imbalances and the preferencing of particular forms of knowledge (Larruina & Ghorashi, 2020). Despite recognition of the benefits of participatory research and increasing interest in such approaches, research prioritising co-creation is not yet common practice.

Through this panel discussion, we aim to discuss and demonstrate the value and viability of co-creation as a core principle of ethical, participant centred research. We hope the panel will bring together researchers, civil society practitioners and research participants to discuss their experiences of working collaboratively in the co-creation of research material and the generation of knowledge. We envisage considering questions such as:

• What is the difference between co-creational and participatory research approaches?
• How can co-creation improve research outcomes and impact.
• What are direct and indirect benefits of co-creation for migrant participants and communities?
• How can co-creational research contribute to improving policymaking?

• What are some of the challenges with co-creation in research and how can these be overcome?

This panel explicitly connects with the core theme of the conference by encouraging researchers to engage and collaborate with migrant communities in the co-creation of research material and knowledge. By presenting examples of research involving co-creation and addressing common challenges such as time constraints, differing priorities, and institutional expectations, we hope participants will leave with practical tips and ideally inspiration for engaging with this research method. The anticipated involvement of researchers, practitioners, and research participants in the panel will directly demonstrate the benefits of collaboration, co-creation and the value of different forms of knowledge.

Contact: natalie.bye@hhs.se

Co-convenors: Melinda Russial (University of Oulu), Sari Vanhanen (Migration Institue of Finland)

“Who gets to know? Who gets known? Where is knowledge kept, and kept legitimated? What knowledge is desirable? Who profits? Who loses/pays/gives something away? Who is coerced, empowered, appointed to give away knowledge?” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 812)

With these questions, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang call us to reflect on the knowledge and power positions typically enforced within academic traditions that enhance asymmetric hierarchies of knowing and being. Participatory and multi-perspective research strategy instead aims to de-hierarchize knowledge production by involving research participants thoroughly as cocreators in the research process. However, participatory research can still be limited by academic frames and conventions, such as the standard linear structures of research articles and assumptions about what constitutes best practice. Thus we ask: What are the academic practices we need to refuse, resist, and transgress in order to make research more ethical and genuinely participatory?

This workshop is focused on the concepts of refusal (e.g. Tuck & Yang, 2014; Gumbs, 2020), transgression (hooks, 1994), and resistance to stigma (Ahmed, 2017; Kulmala et al, 2024). Refusal as a generative concept encourages us to look at realities that are typically left unseen and to imagine futures that we have not yet dared to dream. Thus, refusal is not just saying no, rather it is refusing normative assumptions and rules to make space for redirection of uncontested realities (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Transgression, in the Black feminist tradition of bell hooks (1994), encourages a reframing of potential that does not need the permission of oppressive systems to thrive. Resistance to stigma, in addition, calls us to reflect on our positions and interactions in research and acknowledge various ways of knowing as equally and uniquely valuable.

We invite presentations from various disciplines interested in discussing the following and related themes:

• refusal and resistance in academia
• the practicalities of doing participatory research ethically
• positionalities in participatory research
• the meaning of co-creation of knowledge and shared learning processes in research
• the ethics and dilemmas in doing participatory research
• academic research as a practice of love
• creative collaborative academic writing processes
• the ability of and conditions for participatory research to support societal change

We encourage scholars in different stages of their careers as well as artists, activists, community organizers, and others, to submit proposals for presentations exploring various ways of knowing that contribute to deeper engagement of these themes and possibilities.

Contact: iida.kauhanen@oulu.fi

Co-convenors: Anca Enache (University of Helsinki)

Although migration research has increasingly emphasized “stakeholder involvement” and the importance of “giving back” to researched communities, the actual modes of dissemination have not been fully addressed as situated endeavors. This panel aims to explore how recognizing and employing communication forms held in high regard and practiced in the specific minority community involved in research, might contribute to decolonizing migration research – specifically by grounding dissemination in local epistemologies, situated and reflexive research practices and co-creation of knowledge. By sharing findings through communication forms recognized by and embedded in communities where the research has taken place, community members can truly engage with, and ultimately challenge, the findings. We are inspired by scholars who call for reflexive, experimental and dialogic forms of writing and storytelling (e.g. Behar 1996; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Ahmed 2004; Lawrence-Lightfoot 2005; Abu-Lughod 2008; Kazubowski-Houston 2010; Khosravi 2010, Blasco and Hernandez 2020; Hagatun 2020; Hardy, 2023).

We invite contributions from scholars across disciplines who engage with methods of dissemination, communication, and collaboration with historically oppressed minority communities, such as Roma and Indigenous groups. Examples of questions to explore are:

What kinds of methods and practices enable ethical and sustainable dissemination and communication in historically oppressed minority communities?

What ethical issues should be considered when disseminating one’s findings within such communities? What forms of dissemination can contribute to decolonizing specific disciplines engaged in migration research?

Contact: Kari.Hagatun@uib.no

Co-convenors: Eveliina Lyytinen (Migration Institute of Finland)

In the policy-driven discussions on migration and integration, older migrants are often perceived as a group whose belonging to the new society is questioned (Bastia et al. 2022). However, there is increasing research on older migrants’ wellbeing, relationships of care, access to rights, and everyday life that shed light on their own ways of negotiating belonging. In the field of migration studies age and older migrants have been discussed often in relation to intergenerational and life course approaches. Yet, more research is needed on how social and racial inequalities of older migrants shape their everyday, particularly from an intersectional perspective and with a focus on those originating from outside the EU (KC et al. 2023). Also, while research on older migrants in general has expanded, there is still lack of research on older refugees in particular (Clark-Kazak 2024).

This panel focuses on the question of how are the social relations and experiences of older migrants shaped. We are also keen on exploring what social and political factors influence their living conditions and access to rights. We perceive older migrants as active participants who can challenge social exclusions and contribute to social change whether it is within their families, communities or societies at large. Moreover, we are interested in research that sheds light on how older migrants’ collaboration and agency takes shape across different scales and spaces.

We invite presentations that focus on older migrants – those who have migrated due to voluntary or forced reasons. We approach age as socially constructed and therefore welcome presentations that contextualise what ageing means in the particular contexts of the study. We also welcome contributions that critically address migration as a life event, rather than “migrant” as an identity construction. Also, the focus can be both/either on those who are ageing “in place” and/or those who have newly arrived as an older person.

Contact: anastasia.asikainen@helsinki.fi

The 2025 World Happiness Report ranks all five Nordic countries among the top seven globally. The parameter used is a self-assessed overall life evaluation over a period of 3 years (2022-2024), a general and elusive indicator that does not necessarily imply positive emotions about living in these countries. These results do not distinguish between migrants and native population. However, if life experience is complex and multidimensional, migration adds additional layers of complexity, which further challenge the validity of quantitative results, categories and concepts.

This panel explores the migrant experience of people settling in the Nordic countries, using affects and emotions as the starting point. While closely connected, these concepts highlight different aspects of the lived experience, namely affects draw attention to sensory and bodily dimensions. Affects and emotions are the core of the analysis since they structure the everyday live experience by connecting individuals with the socialmaterial world they inhabit, shaping meaning and fostering belonging between migrants and local communities. It is not a matter of studying experience rather than structures, but of examining structural dimension through the immediacy of lived experience - accessed through the body and perception- and demonstrating how these dimensions are intricately entangled.

The panel will focus primarily on skilled migration - both of Europeans and non-Europeans – to the Nordic countries; a type of migration that is often in demand and less stigmatised institutionally than labour and irregular ones, but not exempt from challenges and negative emotions. The aim of the panel is to account for migrants' experiences starting from their everyday life and daily practices, focusing on how they engage emotionally and affectively with their new sociocultural and ecological context, while maintaining relationships somewhere else and generating different forms of belonging.

Priority will be given to proposals that address the emotional and affective dimensions of the lived experience of this type of migrants, with presentations based on qualitative findings and interdisciplinary research including, but not limited to, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and geography. Qualitative findings refer to data obtained from ethnographic methods such as interviews, participant observation, and audiovisuals, among others. As well, contributions which explore how emotions and affects both shape and are shaped by sociocultural, economic, and political factors will be highly considered; entanglements that constitute different and multiple forms of belonging and demonstrate that, even if material conditions of the migrant are met, they are insufficient to foster a strong sense of belonging to local communities and places. Such bonds are essential for building inclusive and cohesive societies where people feel at home, promoting a lasting sense of well-being rather than a short-term and volatile feeling of happiness.

Contact: ebordogn@hum.uc3m.es

Co-convenors: Vilde Fastvold (University of Oslo)

Across the Nordic region, temporary labour migration has become an integral part of the economy. Seasonal and short-term contracts bring thousands of workers into contact with the welfare states every year. Although many migrants have formal rights, their access to social protections and healthcare remains fragmented and partial. This panel explores transient migration — continuous movement without long-term settlement — and access to healthcare services. It aims to examine migrants’ lived experiences of navigating fragmented rights and systems, and to discuss models for more sustainable and equitable access to healthcare and labour rights. In doing so, the panel aims to contribute to broader debates on welfare bordering, social justice, and the future of inclusive welfare regimes in the Nordic context.

We invite papers that investigate temporary labour migration or other forms of transient migration and their relationship with healthcare services. Topics may include, but are not limited to, continuity of care, chronic illnesses, the development of migrant‑friendly services, co‑production of knowledge, and rights‑based approaches. The panel will explore the paradox of economic dependence on migrant labour while systematically limiting migrants’ social inclusion and will ask how continuity of care can be secured for populations whose lives are characterised by mobility and precarity. We are also particularly interested in how health and welfare institutions respond to transient migrant populations.

To facilitate discussion, we highlight three interconnected aspects that papers might address:

1. Identification regimes and bordering practices: Temporary identification numbers and registration systems create differentiated access to welfare, producing new forms of precarious belonging. These bureaucratic technologies not only regulate mobility but also stratify rights, reinforcing exclusion from primary healthcare.
2. Healthcare vulnerabilities and continuity of care: Lack of access to general practitioners, who function as gatekeepers in Nordic health systems, forces migrants to rely on emergency and ad-hoc services. This undermines chronic disease management, increases reliance on costly acute care, and erodes trust in institutions.
3. Labourmarket conditions and social rights: Precarious contracts, poor housing, and weak enforcement of labour rights intersect with restricted healthcare access, amplifying vulnerabilities. Migrants’ temporary status makes them particularly exposed to exploitation and systemic inequalities.

We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines, including social medicine, history, sociology, anthropology, clinical medicine and health sciences, as well as public health.

Contact: frode.eick@ldh.no

Co-convenors: Simon Roland Birkvad (University of Bergen)

Law regulates access to categories of residence, mobility, and social rights, and thus fundamentally shapes the experiences and living conditions of people on the move. At the same time, legal infrastructures and determinations regulating mobility and residence are increasingly informed by extra-legal expertise, such as medical, forensic, and biometric knowledge. The entanglements and co-workings of law and extra-legal expertise are particularly present in asylum adjudication, due to the combination of a difficult evidentiary situation and a “climate of suspicion” surrounding the category of asylum seekers. Increasingly decision-makers rely on expert knowledge to generate evidence about asylum seekers’ identities, health and conditions in their countries of origin. Novel forms of expertise, such as automated facial recognition and speech biometrics, are used alongside “traditional” forms such as country-of-origin information (COI), identity documents and medical expertise. Underlying all these practices, however, is a desire to make the decision-making process less insecure and more “objective.” Yet expert knowledge is increasingly contested inside and outside court rooms, leaving, perhaps even amplifying, room for discretion for decision-makers.

In this workshop we welcome papers that explore the contentious relationship(s) between migration law and expert knowledge both inside and outside the courtroom, and trace how various actors navigate these spaces of uncertainty and risk. We call for papers, empirical and/or conceptual, that touch upon some of these sets of questions (but not limited to):

• What does it mean as migration scholars to take law seriously as an object of study? How do we analytically and methodologically approach law when seeking to explore legal (technical) expertise and knowledge practices? In the encounters between “us” and the knowledge practices we strive to understand, what causes tension, friction and even contestation? How do we deal with these epistemological (even ontological) frictions (or not)? (researcher-law-relations)
• How do law and (other forms of) expert knowledge mutually inform and influence each other in local contexts of decision-making? How does expert knowledge travel in legal spaces and through which practices of translation? (Law-expertise relations)
• How are “high” (e.g. biometrics) and “low” (e.g. documents) tech, machinic (e.g. algorithmic and x-ray) and human vision (e.g. experts, judges, witnesses) used to make bodies and places known and “objective”? (Evidence-relations)
• What does the co-existence of novel and traditional ways of seeing and knowing tell us about hierarchies of knowledge in society at large? (legal knowledge-societal knowledge relations)

Contact: kari.drangsland@uib.no

Co-convenors: Saara Pellander (Migration Institute of Finland)

This panel explores how migrants, refugees, and other minoritized groups build communities and create new spaces of participation and belonging in restrictive times. We consider these restrictions as multidimensional: they include immigration and citizenship regimes, barriers to public services such as healthcare and education, welfare-state transformations (both historical and present), as well as digital gatekeeping mechanisms. Crisis events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have further intensified these constraints, but also created new spaces and practices for connection and engagement. Against this backdrop, we ask: How do communities navigate these limitations, and what alternative spaces and practices they create to foster solidarity and belonging?

Our focus spans both physical and digital spaces and places of community-based agency. We invite contributions that examine grassroots meeting places (community centers, libraries, informal gathering sites), networks and events (festivals, hobby groups), as well as digital spaces (social media platforms, online forums). We are particularly interested in how these spaces are organized, the emotions and affects involved, the social and structural dynamics related to them, and the role of technological affordances and constraints.

The panel draws on and extends several theoretical perspectives. First, Dana Diminescu’s concept of the “connected migrant” (2008) has challenged the notion of the uprooted migrant by emphasizing transnational networks facilitated by digital technologies. We propose a shift towards “connected communities,” focusing on collective-level processes of belonging and participation that are mediated across both physical and digital environments. Second, we engage with demigranticization (Dahinden 2016; Amelina 2022) by moving beyond fixed migrant categories and instead examining the practices through which people navigate exclusion and cultivate solidarity.

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions from diverse disciplines. While the panel is open to global perspectives, we particularly encourage research situated in or connected to the Nordic region. Papers may address questions, such as:

• How does collective or community-based action and agency emerge under restrictive conditions?
• What organizational cultures, everyday practices, and emotional dynamics shape these spaces?
• How do digital, spatial, or political infrastructures enable or constrain participation and belonging?

Our panel contributes to Nordic migration research by exploring how migrants and other diverse communities forge connections and belonging within or in relation to the Nordic region and its specific institutional, social, and political contexts. Furthermore, it sheds light on the multiple constraints of everyday life by taking into account how migration regimes, welfare-state transformations, digitalization, and other dynamics shape everyday experiences and community-based action, both historically and today.

Contact: tuire.liimatainen@migrationinstitute.fi

o-convenors: Elo-Hanna Seljamaa (University of Tartu)

This panel examines migration and national membership in the Nordic–Baltic region. Membership lies at the core of immigration and integration processes. It concerns who should be ‘let in’ – admitted to the national space – and who should be granted different forms of legal status ranging from temporary residence rights to national citizenship. Security perceptions increasingly shape states’ membership policies and regulations—for instance by portraying some groups as potential threats to national security, and others as deserving protection from war or other security-related risks.

The Nordic–Baltic region is a setting in which security concerns have become particularly salient in the aftermath of events such as the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the “long summer of migration” in 2015, and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Against this shifting security landscape, the panel invites papers that analyze migration and membership by centering questions of security and change within this regional context.

Contributions may focus on membership politics and policymaking, on how affected individuals, the broader citizenry, or civil society actors experience, navigate, and respond to membership conditionalities and regulations, or on other relevant themes. Papers may address a specific national setting (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland) or adopt transnational, comparative or broader regional perspectives. We welcome empirical, theoretical, and conceptual contributions that explore the interplay between migration, national membership, and security, as well as papers addressing methodological challenges associated with studying these issues.

Contact: karin.borevi@sh.se

Co-convenors: Matti Välimäki (University of Helsinki)

In a development described as a ‘deportation turn’ (Gibney 2008, 142), removals of non-citizens have become a political priority across the countries of the so-called Global North, with growing efforts to enforce returns. While mass deportation has become a political fantasy of the far right, there has on a more mundane level been a normalization of ‘deportability’ – the constant threat of removal – as a means of controlling immigrant populations.

The Nordic countries appear to have taken part in this development, seeking particularly after 2015 to expand their infrastructural and legal capacity to remove non-citizens, and in many cases registering high deportation rates relative to migrant population (e.g. Könönen 2025; Lindberg 2019; Weber 2014; Leerkes & Van Houten 2020).

Yet there is room to nuance or question the notion of a 'deportation turn' both theoretically and empirically in the Nordic context. The panel thus invites contributions examining the changing practices, politics and outcomes of enforced return. Comparative contributions are welcomed also from outside the Nordic context.

Contact: miika.tervonen@helsinki.fi

Co-convenors: Stacey Wilson-Forsberg (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Resettlement involves a radical transition from one part of the world to another. However, resettlement entails more than a physical move; it entails a complex set of transitions that are often compounded by trauma, linguistic displacements and existential upheaval (Moustakim and Mackay 2018). Newly resettled refugees often encounter an arrival infrastructure of state and non-state actors such as NGOs, religious communities, diaspora-networks, and new neighbours, orienting and assisting the newcomers in their process of settling in new country (Rytter and Kusk in press; Jensen et al. 2024). In many receiving countries, resettled refugees are subject to work-fare programs, promoting (neoliberal) values such as independence, discipline, and self-sufficiency. Despite the differences between the receiving countries in “the global north”, precarity of camp life oftentimes continue to be salient after resettlement but may take new forms (Evans et al. 2022). Resettlement may nonetheless be imagined as a new beginning; a move towards a life marked by security and new possibilities, involving a range of transitions – from camp life to urban dwelling, from financially dependent to self-sufficient, from “woman at risk” to single mother (Mortensen 2025), from child to young adult (Kusk 2025; Mortensen et al. 2024), from school to university, university to labour market, and family formation to retirement and eldercare (Jensen and Rytter in press; Jensen et al. 2024). Each transition may involve a struggle and often resistance in various forms in the everyday.

This panel broadly conceptualizes resettlement as a process, involving a range of multilayered transitions that people are negotiating in their daily lives. This perspective brings into focus the complexity and temporality of experiences of resettlement shaped by age, gender, local policy, life histories, state and non-state actors, as well as involving individual struggle, negotiation and resistance towards local legal frameworks and social expectations and norms.

The panel invites paper proposals that explore transitions of resettled refugees and the daily struggles it might involve. We are especially interested in papers that seek to redefine how communities support resettled refugees and their struggles with transitions—not as recipients of charity, but as co-creators of their own pathways to success. The panel is further interested in papers exploring the various forms of resistance that may be involved in such transitions among resettled refugees. That is, papers that explore and address the agency of resettled refugees to affect both their surroundings and their own paths.

Contact: elm@cas.au.dk

Co-convenors: Olga Sasunkevich (University of Gothenburg), Andrea Spehar (University of Gothenburg), Viktoriia Svidovska (NGO Help Ukraine Gothengurg)

In this open panel we invite scholars and representatives of local communities and NGOs to reflect on their experiences of research on and community work with Ukrainians displaced by the Russia’s full-scale invasion in various Nordic societies. The panel encourages multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral dialogue between participants with various backgrounds, working with the reception, establishment, providing support and guidance, as well as collaborating with Ukrainian diaspora and displaced Ukrainians across the Nordic region.

The panel aims to problematise situation of displaced Ukrainians against the background of migration and integration policies in the Nordic countries, diminishing their ambitions day by day. While displaced Ukrainians received a special protection status under the EU Temporary Protection Directive, the general policies aimed at decreasing the number of migrants and their social rights in the Nordic countries significantly shape their life chances. For Ukrainians, majority of whom are established as residents in the Nordic countries, albeit with limited possibility to stay longer than 2027, this presents a new challenge. Many of them have managed to find employment and created tangible social anchors in host societies, by reuniting with their families, building new families and through education opportunities for children and young people. While the Russia’s brutal war is still ongoing, Ukraine is suffering heavy demographic crisis and expects its citizens to return. At the same time, European and Nordic migration governance advance the trope of restricted welfare support for the displaced and voluntary return to the country origin. The future of Ukrainians remains uncertain, especially approaching 2027, but they seem to already begin a transformation from ‘welcomed guests’ to ‘unwanted migrants’.

Through this panel, we seek to illuminate and discuss the following themes and questions:

Temporariness and its consequences:

How does temporary protection shape the everyday experiences, aspirations, and wellbeing of Ukrainians and their children?

How do families navigate education, employment, housing, and long-term planning under conditions of uncertainty?

Migration governance, precarity, and racialisation:

In what ways do current interpretations or reforms of the TPD contribute to processes of bureaucratic precarity and marginalisation of displaced Ukrainians in the Nordic context?

How experiences of Ukrainians overlap and differ with those of other people displaced by war and what role racialisation play in this regard

Policy dilemmas: permanence vs. return:

What are the main challenges for policymakers in formulating sustainable solutions regarding long-term residence, integration, or return to Ukraine?

How do these dilemmas intersect with labour market needs, political priorities, and public opinion?

Agency, networks, and translocal strategies:

How do Ukrainians across the Nordic region mobilise cultural resources, economic strategies, diaspora networks, and translocal forms of support to navigate uncertainty and build resilience?

Future engagement and global Ukrainian communities:

What might constitute an effective and ethically grounded strategy for engaging with Ukrainian communities abroad—both for host countries and for Ukraine—especially for those who choose or need to remain outside the country long-term?

Contact: oksana.shmulyar@socav.gu.se

This panel brings together research examining experiences and narratives of queer migrants from Russia to Northern Europe and the Baltics. Previous studies have examined politically motivated migration from Russia as a result of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the tightening of queerphobic legislation before 2022. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the ongoing conflicting politicization of LGBTQ rights are experienced by individuals escaping state-sponsored homophobia in Russia and how these discourses enable and constrain engagement with local communities in hosting societies. The papers of the panel are united by a common approach in which sexuality and gender are understood to shape mobilities across Northern Europe (Sweden, Finland) and the Baltics and affect LGBTQ migrants’ experiences and geopolitical positionalities. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, and on ethnographic methods, such as interviews and observations, the papers foreground the intersection of queer migration with identifications along the axes of class, sexuality, ethnicity, and transness. This panel attempts to map a research agenda that moves beyond celebratory narratives of inclusion to critically examine the stratifications and new solidarities within queer migrant communities. The panel explores how queer migrants from Russia negotiate belonging across shifting political, social, and cultural landscapes: considering this as an ongoing relational and emotional process, it highlights how queer Russian migrants actively reshape the terms of membership, participation, and recognition in their new environments. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Russian queer migrants in Sweden, Finland, and the Baltics navigate privilege, seek support, and mitigate vulnerabilities through engagement with local communities, civil society spaces, and transnational networks. Thus, we are interested in analyzing the paradoxical effects of state-sponsored queerphobia on Russian migrants. While it engenders political alienation, it remains an open question whether this forges a cohesive "queer diaspora" or, conversely, fragments the community along multiple lines of identification. We explore the ways in which this alienation severs ties to Russian society entirely and instead cultivates new, fluid forms of transnational belonging that challenge the hegemony of the nation-state.

Contact: kirill.polkov@sh.se

Co-convenors: Gudbjörg Ottósdóttir (University of Iceland)

Contemporary Nordic migration politics continue to rely on a narrative of moral superiority and benevolence — a form of Nordic exceptionalism that sustains the image of humanitarian integrity even as state discourses and policy developments become increasingly securitized. Alongside this tightening of borders and welfare systems, the region simultaneously depends on flexible, precarious, and easily deportable migrant labour, particularly within the rising gig-economy and digital service platforms. Such labour infrastructures — often justified as progressive innovations that grant autonomy to marginalized groups — instead reproduce hierarchies through racial platform capitalism, neoliberal restructuring, and risk-laden forms of citizenship that hinge on conditional inclusion. Humanitarian and social service sectors are even entangled in these shifts, increasingly reliant on temporary funding, contractual outsourcing and state-directed mandates that foreground efficiency and quantifiable output over care, affect, or social justice. While politicians publicly frame digital platforms as emancipatory opportunities for groups such as the elderly, the disabled, or newly arrived migrants, the primary economic beneficiaries tend to remain white, abled, cis-heterosexual Nordic entrepreneurs. These contradictions raise critical questions about who such infrastructures are truly built for, and whose labour sustains them.

Despite growing scholarship on Nordic migration, less is known about what happens inside the everyday labour encounters that unfold across these transnational infrastructures. How do queer, feminist, migrant or disabled subjects contest the policing of identity and productivity? Where do we locate the killjoy who interrupts smooth narratives of progress?

This panel highlights how queer method and queer subjectivity destabilize the aspiration toward seamless governance. Queerness makes visible what policy seeks to streamline: affective labour, bodily difference, intimate citizenship, and the unruly life that refuses to be flattened into bureaucratic or platform-compatible form. The panel therefore invites contributions that explore these minority encounters — from gig-work and humanitarian mediation to grassroots resistance and platform-based survival strategies. We welcome papers that examine how individuals and communities navigate, appropriate or resist neoliberal platform systems; how public figures and policymakers mobilize this terrain rhetorically; how media events reassemble or fracture infrastructures of belonging; and how identity is performed, fragmented, or counter-assembled within spaces built for and against marginalized bodies.

Key Questions

1. How do Nordic humanitarian and political narratives construct the desired migrant subject, and how does a queer theoretical lens expose or disrupt expectations of legibility, docility, and infrastructural smoothness?
2. How are identities counter-assembled within minority infrastructures, particularly when marginalized migrants re-appropriate, subvert, or strategically withdraw from surveillance-driven or efficiency-oriented systems?
3. What forms of friction, killjoy interruption, or social reproductive justiceemergewithin everyday labour encounters and humanitarian engagements — and how do these unsettle neoliberal mandates for productivity, transparency, and control?
4. What forms of social reproductive justice become thinkable when queer theory is used not only toanalyseprecarity, but to expose infrastructural desire — and to imagine modes of care, solidarity, and labour beyond neoliberal extraction?

Contact: ardis.ingvars@unive.it

Co-convenors: Disa Helander (Umeå University)

This panel examines the growing role of DNA and other technoscientific tools in shaping migration governance, claims to belonging, and the organisation of family life. Across the Nordic region and within global migration regimes, DNA testing has become embedded in legal decision-making, transnational family reunification, and practices of kinship that extend across borders. Yet DNA operates as more than a device for verifying biological relatedness. It produces new forms of scientific knowledge, introduces shifting epistemic statuses, and becomes a site of political contestation. Building on Nelson’s (2016) notion of the “social life” of DNA, this panel explores how technoscientific knowledge is mobilised, negotiated, and made meaningful in contexts of migration. In line with research highlighting knowledge production as central to migration control (Amelung, et al 2024), the panel contributes with analyses of a form of evidence often considered uniquely authoritative.

We welcome papers that investigate the social life of technoscientific knowledge within migration governance. While DNA testing is a key point of departure, the panel also invites studies of age assessments, biometric, and other technoscientific practices increasingly woven into state responses to mobility. These forms of evidence shape how migration regimes construct identity, relatedness, and credibility. The panel seeks to interrogate how such knowledge is produced, circulates across institutions and borders, acquires authority, and becomes meaningful to both state actors and migrants. We are especially interested in research showing how technoscientific knowledge, while serving as an instrument of state control, may also be reinterpreted, repurposed, or strategically mobilised by migrants, advocates, and civil-society actors. In doing so, the panel foregrounds how these technologies intersect with ideas of mobility, family, reproduction, nationhood, and belonging.

Our approach is critical migration studies and feminist technoscience studies. These perspectives illuminate how scientific “truths” take shape within unequal power relations and how expertise is constructed, contested, and stratified. Drawing on these frameworks, we encourage analyses of how scientific knowledge is mobilised in migrant activism, whose knowledge is legitimised or marginalised, and how migrants’ embodied experiences intersect with technoscientific–bureaucratic systems.

Methodologically, we invite, ethnographic, archival, digital, participatory, or mixed-methods approaches to investigate how technoscientific evidence is produced, interpreted, or disputed in migration contexts. We particularly welcome contributions that trace migrants’, families’, practitioners’, and activists’ encounters with these technologies, or that follow knowledge as it circulates across institutional, legal, and transnational sites. Feminist methodological commitments—reflexivity, attention to power, and centring marginalised perspectives—are encouraged.

Expected contributions may explore how technoscientific knowledge is interpreted or misinterpreted; how it becomes embedded in everyday bureaucratic routines; how migrants navigate evidentiary demands; how civil-society actors, scientists, or legal advocates challenge dominant epistemic regimes; or how critical scholarship scrutinises and reshapes the uses of such knowledge.

This panel is timely for NMR as Nordic states expand their reliance on technoscientific evidence to regulate mobility, determine kinship, and adjudicate belonging. By foregrounding the social life of technoscientific knowledge, the panel contributes to urgent debates on the politics of knowledge, governance, justice, and evolving landscapes of migration regulation in the Nordic.

Contact: llpedersen@ruc.dk

Co-convenors: Ibrahim Efe (University of Manchester)

This panel examines post-disaster migration management in Global South contexts, exploring how hybrid governance arrangements emerge when displacement crises intersect with existing migration pressures and restrictive policy environments. Focusing on cases where disaster response overlaps with protracted refugee situations, the panel analyses how NGOs, local authorities, and civil society navigate fragmented institutional landscapes to manage both emergency displacement and longer-term migration governance. Drawing particularly on how disaster contexts reshape NGO-state relations, local governance innovations, and collaborative practices, we ask: What hybrid models emerge at the municipal level when disaster response must address both newly displaced populations and established migrant communities? How do communicative performances and narrative strategies mediate governance when formal structures fracture? How do these Southern experiences illuminate alternative pathways for collaborative migration management beyond restrictive Northern frameworks?

The panel integrates critical governance studies, disaster studies, and migration scholarship through several theoretical lenses: communicative and performative approaches to governance that examine how authority is enacted through narrative and symbolic practices; hybrid governance theory exploring formal-informal institutional arrangements; and street-level bureaucracy perspectives on frontline actors' discretionary power. We employ postcolonial critiques to centre Global South governance innovations rather than treating them as deviations from Northern models. The framework of "governance under uncertainty" examines how actors interpret opaque institutional signals and navigate shifting regulatory conditions. Concepts of "collaborative fragmentation" and "adaptive informality" help analyse how decentralized, network-based responses emerge from institutional gaps rather than comprehensive planning.

Panel papers will document: (1) how NGO practitioners employ narrative and communicative performances to negotiate ambiguous state authority in post-disaster contexts; (2) the emergence of distinctive municipal governance models (e.g., Gaziantep's hybrid approach) that combine local political leadership, NGO networks, and flexible administrative practices; (3) tensions between emergency humanitarian logics and existing restrictive migration frameworks when disaster strikes migranthosting regions; (4) the role of informality and discretion in enabling collaborative responses when formal structures prove inadequate; and (5) how Global South governance innovations—characterized by adaptive hybridity rather than comprehensive bureaucratic planning—offer alternative models for managing complex displacement scenarios. Findings will illuminate both the creative solidarities and persistent exclusions produced when disaster governance intersects with migration control.

While centring Global South experiences, this panel directly engages Nordic migration scholarship by challenging Northerncentric assumptions about "best practices" in migration governance. As Nordic countries confront increasingly restrictive policies alongside growing climate-related displacement, Southern hybrid governance models—emphasizing local flexibility, NGO-state collaboration, and adaptive informality—offer critical comparative insights. The panel addresses conference sub-themes including "climate change and migration-related community responses," "transnational networks and local collaborations," "civil society actors in local communities," and "street level collaboration between authorities and civil society." By examining how communities, NGOs, and municipalities collaborate within and despite restrictive national frameworks, the panel contributes to understanding possibilities for solidarity and social justice across diverse geographical and political contexts.

Contact: tim.jacoby@manchester.ac.uk

Research on forced displacement, and on asylum seekers in temporary hosting infrastructures, is typically informed by a strong participatory mandate. The idea that refugees should be actively involved in knowledge production and circulation reflects a basic and general ethical stance. However, it also articulates a more fundamentally transformative view: making research relevant for participants, and societally impactful, would rely on them becoming active collaborators at different stages of data collection and analysis, as well as of writing, dissemination, and advocacy. Research wise, this participatory drive feeds into the increasing emphasis on art- and community-based or policy-relevant methods with "vulnerable" subjects. At a societal level, it resonates with local inclusion policies for community engagement as a precondition for refugee "integration". As far as qualitative research is concerned, however, active participation can encounter significant challenges and limitations. While these are not necessarily new for refugee studies, they have taken new salience in research on asylum reception facilities, most visibly in Nordic countries.

This panel invites reflexive and critical contributions from colleagues who have done in-depth fieldwork into refugee housing and with young asylum seekers in general, from different disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical positionings. Since the 2015 "refugee crisis", insider ethnographies on the lived spaces of asylum have made for a constellation of small-scale studies all across Europe. One of these is my recent book Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance (University of California Press, OA, 2025). This ethnography, centred on what young men waiting for asylum do while claiming that they are "doing nothing", raises a number of methodological points on participation as a desire and an achievement - and for the need to recalibrate it along the way.

For one thing, approaching asylum seekers raises dilemmas that have not to do only with their frailty, or with the hostile environments that surround them. Researchers also have to navigate the consequences of their temporal suspension, and the underlying sense of emptiness and meaninglessness; reckon with the meanings and functions of silence, and with the shifting line between what could or should be articulated or not; acknowledge the aftermath of past suffering and present uncertainty, and of the tension between the moral imperative to achieve adulthood, and meet transnational kinship obligations, and the little scope available for that. Participation may risk over-exposing people who wish little exposure. Many, perhaps most field interlocutors may find little point in it. Even in the best case, participation is inherently selective and graduated. As far as effective forms of active participation do take place, however, they can yield both epistemic and societal benefits. How far these play out at a community level - e.g facilitating a better informed public debate, and deeper sensitivity to asylum - or produce tangible improvements for refugees themselves is, in turn, a question that requires a critical dialogue across case studies, as is the aim of this panel.

Contact: paolo.boccagni@unitn.it

Co-convenors: René León Rosales (Multicultural Centre, Botkyrka & Södertörn University)

Culturally relevant pedagogy, a theoretical framework introduced by Gloria Ladson-Billings, addresses how educational institutions can support students in affirming their cultural identities while simultaneously promoting academic achievement and critical consciousness. This approach seeks to challenge systemic inequities embedded within school structures. Ladson-Billings developed the model based on her research on exemplary teachers who consistently enabled their students to succeed academically.

This panel aims to examine the opportunities and challenges of applying this theoretical model to analyses of the Swedish school system and teaching practices, as well as those in the other Nordic countries. In 2020, a governmental report investigated strategies for creating a more equitable school system, reducing segregation, and improving resource allocation. The report highlighted a lack of competence in areas internationally referred to as culturally relevant teaching—an approach shown to enhance academic outcomes among minority groups and in contexts of social exclusion.

The idea for the panel builds on insights from a pilot study in which we interviewed two headmasters, among others. Using the local community as an educational resource, identity texts, and leadership as overarching themes, we explored their pedagogical practices and perspectives on the needs of their students. The headmasters raised fundamental questions about the purpose and nature of education. These reflections often included the socio-cultural and material conditions of the students’, and the headmasters stressed how they themselves identified with their students and saw the neighborhoods as important resources. Academically, they aimed at finding ways to engage the students in their schools and their learning.

The panel aims to explore how educators in the Nordic countries develop their own models or adopt strategies designed to handle the inequities of the different school systems. We will further investigate how these models and strategies align with the principles of culturally relevant pedagogy. What is the potential for further integrating Ladson-Billings’ framework into Nordic educational contexts?

We invite papers that explore how culturally relevant pedagogy can be used as a concept for studying equity in Nordic schools, by making students more engaged in their own education, both as peers and teachers.

Contact: david.gunnarsson@sh.se

Co-convenors: Anastasia Diatlova (University of Helsinki), Olivia Maury (University of Helsinki), Synnøve Bendixsen (University of Bergen)

While the erosion of decent and dignified work has been well-documented across advanced welfare states in Europe as well as in the United States and globally, the Nordic countries have so far fared better when it comes to standard employment opportunities. Nordic welfare states have comparatively low levels of insecure, uncertain, and unstable employment, i.e. precarious work and they still provide protection against adverse labour market shocks such as sickness and unemployment. However, these protections are mainly provided to permanent residents with access to residence-based welfare-state facilities. Racialised migrant workers, especially workers with temporary and increasingly conditional residence permits, posted workers, and irregularised migrants, are excluded from decent and dignified work and secure livelihoods in the Nordic countries. Due to structural discrimination and racist prejudice, migrant workers have limited options beyond the low-paid but often essential jobs regardless of educational background or skills. Individualistic explanations focusing on migrants’ vulnerability due to lacking skills, knowledge of rights, networks or language are not sufficient because these factors make migrants attractive labour in the first place. Such explanations do not account for the crucial role that migrant labour plays in sustaining Nordic welfare states. Hence critical approaches taking into account how labour, migration and welfare regimes connect in shaping labour markets and precarious work force are needed as are approaches that consider forms of structural discrimination along the intersections of race, citizenship, gender, age and class.

Moreover, even if the broad outline of how and why precarious employment is increasingly also a Nordic problem are known, less is known about many important aspects of it, such as its drivers, how it impacts migrant workers’ and their families livelihoods and futures beyond the immediate labour conditions, if the emergence of precarious work is leading to also a worsening of previously non-precarious workers’ conditions, and how traditional trade unions and industrial relations systems are responding, if at all.

This panel proposes to include papers that engage with critical perspectives on labour precarity and migration, especially in the Nordic countries (or Nordic countries in comparison with others). We welcome empirical papers including, but not limited to, the following topics: forms of precarious migrant labour in specific sectors, impact of precarity for migrant workers and their families; intersectional analysis of labour precarity; migrants’ strategies for managing and resisting labour precarity; the role of trade unions in labour sectors dependent on migrant workers; drivers and long-term impact of migrants’ labour precarity, and analyses of intersections of welfare and migration regimes in shaping precarious labour. We are also open to conceptual papers that theorise migrant precarity in the wider context of the erosion of secure employment, processes of digitalisation and platformisation, and racial capitalism in the Nordic countries.

The panel is organised by the Tackling Precarious and Informal Work in the Nordic Countries -project (PrecaNord, 2022-2026), funded by Future Challenges in the Nordics programme, and Caring Labour: A multi-modal study of migrant workers' care practices and mobilities (CaringLabour, 2025-2027) - project, funded by the Kone Foundation.

Keywords: precarious work, precarious mobilities, racialised labour regimes, multiple precarities

Contact: lena.nare@helsinki.fi

Contact: maria.rydell@su.se

Co-convenors: Natalia Volvach (Stockholm University), Andreas Nuottaniemi (Stockholm University)

In integration debates, language is often discursively constructed as a ‘problem’ (Frykman et al., 2023) or a ‘key’ (Rydell et al., 2024). In this panel, we ask how different languages and different perspectives on what constitutes ‘good language’ are valorized in different contexts and how this shapes migrants’ sense of inclusion and exclusion. We deploy the ‘margins’ as a lens to study how marginalized speakers position themselves as agents, as well as claim voice and visibility (Milani, 2017). Exploring the lived and embodied experiences of language among the speakers on the margins ethnographically allows us to shed light on the alternative ways in which individuals make themselves heard and create communities. Such alternative ways also then provide a ground for ‘ethical (re)imaginations’, for thinking migration ‘otherwise’, that is, beyond the mainstream discourses on migration and language. This turn also speaks to postmigration scholarship that views migration not as a state of exception or ‘crisis’, but an indispensable part of today’s societies (Hosseini, 2025). The panel presents three ethnographic studies, followed by an open discussion on how language shapes contemporary migration experiences through inclusion and exclusion. Time: 2 h.

N. Volvach:
Crafting Selves in-between Conversations and Art Making This talk presents the results of an ongoing ethnographic study. Using a variety of art-based research methods, such as PhotoVoice, language portrait, and figure crafting workshops, together with open-ended interviews, I discuss how Ukrainian migrant women in Stockholm talk about learning and unlearning different languages when documenting their experiences individually as well as drawing and hand-crafting together. These encounters, enabled through an emergence of a ‘transient community’ (De Fina et al., 2020), one that is shaped by research participants and the researcher, also reveal the absent presence of war and its effects.

M. Rydell:
Diversifying Education - Embodied Learning through the Arts This talk explores performative teaching, i.e. the integration of art-based methods into L2 instruction (Piazzoli & Dalziel, 2024), for newly arrived teenage migrant students. Over the course of an academic year, we conducted a video ethnography with a class of low literate migrant students, many of whom have refugee backgrounds and limited prior schooling. Here, we focus on how students engage with art, performance and embodied enactments as an alternative way of expression, and the affordances and constraints encountered during the class’ visits to various cultural institutions.

A. Nuottaniemi:
Language, capital and the value of speechless workers This paper draws on an ongoing ethnographic study of migrant workers in the green industrial sector in northern Sweden. It examines the function of language within a local production regime shaped by migration and the de-skilling of labour. In this context, basic English often operates as a minimal working language, embedded in task coordination and repetitive labour, reducing incentives to invest in Swedish language learning. Combining critical sociolinguistics (Heller, Pietikäinen, & Pujolar, 2024) with Marxist value theory (Marx, 1970), the paper situates these language practices within broader processes of labour discipline and class reproduction. It shows how migrants’ linguistic capacities may function as a “free gift” to capital, while longer-term language development is rendered unnecessary.

Co-convenors: Jacob Lind (Malmö University), Vanna Nordling (Malmö University), Minna Seikkula (University of Helsinki)

In recent years, the Nordic countries have implemented increasingly restrictive immigration policies that undermine migrants’ rights to residence, employment, social welfare, family reunification, and citizenship. Repressive measures particularly target asylum seekers by complicating access to international protection and pressuring deportable individuals to “voluntarily” return through exclusionary policies. Even fundamental legal guarantees enshrined in EU and international law are sidelined in a militarized policy context, as exemplified by Finland’s recent closure of its border with Russia. Meanwhile, immigration policy reforms tend to weaken the position of all migrants, limiting access to Nordic welfare systems and constraining migrant workers under the goal of preventing exploitation.

These new exclusionary policies sharply diverge from the 2015 civil-society wave of solidarity and the widespread “migrants welcome” sentiment, generating profound anxiety and a sense of powerlessness among scholars, activists, and others committed to social justice. While critical migration scholars produce highly relevant research on migrants’ struggles and the harmful consequences of migration governance, this work often has little impact on immigration policies. Instead of addressing these issues, the new policies tend to exacerbate the identified harms, including exclusion from social welfare, insecure residence, precarious employment, and immigration detention. Scholars also find themselves increasingly marginalized in public debates, ignored by policymakers, or even targeted by racist backlash. The expanded securitization and militarization of migration—coupled with a growing anti-immigration environment—raises pressing questions about the role, responsibilities, and transformative possibilities of critical scholarship today.

This roundtable invites participants to reflect on their experiences and perspectives regarding these challenges across different Nordic contexts and think collectively about possible ways forward. What are the key struggles, which developments are most concerning, and how might they be resisted? What forms of engagement, collaboration, and solidarity among migrants, activists, scholars, and concerned citizens are possible—or necessary—during this moment of political anxiety and exhaustion? By bringing together scholars working in diverse settings, the session seeks to explore pathways for collaborative engagement and to strengthen Nordic networks committed to the protection of migrants’ rights.

Contact: jukka.kononen@helsinki.fi

Co-convenors: Hossam Sultan (Linköping University)

Despite the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and again in 1967, and their subsequent statelessness and migration globally, including to the Nordic countries (Denmark and Sweden in particular), Palestine has been scarcely explored in migration studies. Attempts to conduct research on Palestinians displacement has been complicated by the different ways in which Palestinian nationality has been categories in different states. The question of the erasure of Palestinian life is thus broader than Israel’s current war on Gaza and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Its importance for migration studies cannot be overstated. A study of Palestine and the Palestinian diasporas in Europe in general, and the Nordic countries in particular, can be framed through various questions central to the mission of critical migration studies, which seek to examine how unequal power structures shape mobility, borders and differentiated opportunities.

In this roundtable, we aim to underscore why Palestine matters in migration studies. We invite contributions on various topics that engage with questions including but not limited to historical and contemporary perspectives on displacement; (support for) settler colonialism; rethinking and critiquing categories that render some groups of people invisible while privileging others (the erasure of Palestinian nationality), and the (lack of) representation of Palestinian voices in the media. The roundtable is also open to submissions that highlight the policing of and reactions to the Palestine solidarity movement and the broader repercussions for those involved in it, sometimes including individuals with precarious resident statuses. The roundtable will foster discussion on reactions to the war on Gaza and Israel’s aggression, both within and beyond academia, and, not least, on the tangible silences and omissions surrounding Palestine that shape contemporary debates in the social sciences and humanities, including migration studies.

Please submit a short abstract (maximum 300 words) outlining the key contribution you intend to make to the roundtable.

Contact: liina.mustonen@helsinki.fi

Roundtable discussion

Participants: Maria Moberg Stephenson, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Karlstad University Sanja Obrenovic Johansson, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Södertörn University Heike Peter, Senior Lecturer in History of Religions, Halmstad University Signild Risenfors, Docent in Pedagogy, University West

Moderator: Linnea Åberg, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, University West

This roundtable discussion wishes to contribute to a debate on how researchers may strengthen an engagement achieving a general public through the production of course literature on migration for university students. The production of textbooks or course literature is normally not instrumental to advance in a researcher’s profession. Teaching students on the other hand is part of our profession. The participants of this panel belong to four different university disciplines, all teaching on migration in connection to different professions such as cultural studies, teacher education, social work, or the police. Based on their experience of teaching across different subjects at four higher education institutions, they found a lack of a Swedish language textbook that addresses migration issues in all their complexity. Many programmes require updated theoretical, empirical, and didactic knowledge.

Swedish course literature is often too narrowly tailored to individual professions, even though professional practice typically demands collaboration— for example between social services, schools, and the police. International migration research has generated new knowledge that needs to be integrated into course literature. For a socially sustainable society in the long term, educational programmes must offer students opportunities to acquire integrated knowledge and to develop the capacity to address the challenges they will face in their future professions.

The panel members decided to design course literature and invited scholars from various Swedish universities to contribute. The idea was to combine solid theoretical foundation as well as empirical evidence showing both structures and agency matters with a broad scope drawing on current research demonstrating that migration, social justice, ethnic relations, and processes of racialization are interdependent themes.

The roundtable will discuss their findings and possible contributions for increased knowledge on migrations studies for a general public.

Contact: sanja.obrenovic.johansson@sh.se

Swedish migration policy has undergone dramatic changes in both rhetoric and practice over the past century. The 1930s’ suspicion of foreigners and strict maintenance requirements shifted in the postwar period toward a more humanitarian rhetoric, as well as ambitious integration goals.

Especially since 2015, and not least during the current election year, immigration has come to dominate the political agenda as well as the media landscape, illuminating how the pendulum has once again swung in a more restrictive direction.

This development reveals clear tensions between the state and civil society, as well as between government, industry, and municipalities. This raises a multitude of questions. How has policy been shaped in practice? What role has civil society played? How have discourses centered on humanitarian responsibility versus order and control shaped migration policy over time? Additionally, research adopting a refugee-centered perspective has in recent years become increasingly important. This provides a more nuanced understanding of the consequences of policy for the individual refugee, and how they have navigated the shifting conditions of migration policy, which helps to problematize established narratives of passive reception.

In this roundtable, five migration historians meet to highlight the complexity of the migration policy field and how Swedish refugee policy has shifted between humanitarian rhetoric, state control, and civil-society influence, and not least the experiences of immigrants and refugees in Sweden. The conversation aims to discuss historical explanatory models, the connection between policy, influence, and practice, and to formulate questions for future research.

Author biographies

Malin Thor Tureby is a Professor of History. Her research has focused on the Hechaluz movement, Jewish refugee assistance, and how refugees and survivors were received during and after the war. She has also studied testimonies and interviews with refugees and migrants and how migration has become part of Sweden’s cultural heritage.

Pär Frohnert has published on Swedish migration history for more than ten years, including Invandringens historia – från ”folkhemmet” till dagens Sverige (Delmi 2017:5, with Mikael Byström), and most recently the book, ”Hjälp våra flyktingar!” Politisk och ideell hjälpverksamhet i Sverige 1933-1939 (2024).

James Lancaster completed his PhD in 2024 with the dissertation Humanitarians at Home: Swedish Civil Society Actors, Refugee Aid and Advocacy 1951–1991. In migration history he is particularly interested in the role of civil-society actors in shaping migration-policy and their dependence on the state.

Peter Bauer completed his PhD in 2023 with the dissertation När slutar invandrarna vandra? Integrationsfrågan i statlig, kommunal och skolpolitisk diskurs 1967–2000. His migration-historical interests focus on how immigrants and refugees are represented in national versus local politics and on the social movements mobilized around refugee issues.

Martin Englund’s completed his PhD in 2025 with the dissertation Vi, de fördrivna - Historiska erfarenheter hos polska judar som kom till Sverige 1967–1972, which explored the historical experiences of Polish Jews in Sweden. His research focuses on oral history, minorities, migration, memory culture, and history didactics.

Contact: james.lancaster@oru.se