Program for August 12th

By analyzing the processes that, over recent decades, have contributed to the dismantling of what was once a vibrant Swedish Muslim civil society, this keynote lecture illuminates the discursive strategies that have enabled this development, as well as the consequences it has had for Swedish-Muslim citizens in Sweden. Building on this problematization, the speakers draw on the works of, among others, Sarah Ahmed and Paulo Freire to reflect on research strategies that may be employed to counter the societal processes that lead to the marginalization and criminalization of oppressed groups. The lecture highlights finally the need for new concepts capable of naming and rendering visible silenced realities within society.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rene-Leon-Rosales

https://www.svartvit.substack.com/about Länk till annan webbplats.

Panel 4 schedule and abstracts pdf, 282.4 kB.

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

Panel 16 schedule and abstracts pdf, 300.5 kB.

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

Panel 13 schedule and abstracts pdf, 271.7 kB.

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

Panel 27 schedule and abstracts pdf, 332 kB.

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

Panel 7 schedule and abstracts pdf, 250.4 kB.

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

Panel 8 schedule and abstracts pdf, 237.5 kB.

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

Panel 26b schedule and abstracts pdf, 296 kB.

Co-convenors: Anna-Mia Bergkvist (Södertörn University)

The panel explores how education intersects with equity, migration, language, and social inclusion across diverse contexts. Highlighting the experiences of marginalized groups—including minority youth, Roma children, refugees, deaf learners, and rural young people—showing how educational opportunities are shaped by discrimination, language access, mobility, and regional inequalities.

Contact: liz.adams.lyngback@specped.su.se

Panel 18 schedule and abstracts pdf, 222.6 kB.

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

Panel 4 schedule and abstracts pdf, 282.4 kB.

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

Panel 16 schedule and abstracts pdf, 300.5 kB.

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

Panel 13 schedule and abstracts pdf, 271.7 kB.

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

Panel 27 schedule and abstracts pdf, 332 kB.

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

Panel 7 schedule and abstracts pdf, 250.4 kB.

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

Panel 8 schedule and abstracts pdf, 237.5 kB.

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

Panel 26b schedule and abstracts pdf, 296 kB.

Co-convenors: Anna-MIa Bergkvist (Södertörn University)

The panel explores how education intersects with equity, migration, language, and social inclusion across diverse contexts. Highlighting the experiences of marginalized groups—including minority youth, Roma children, refugees, deaf learners, and rural young people—showing how educational opportunities are shaped by discrimination, language access, mobility, and regional inequalities.

Contact: liz.adams.lyngback@specped.su.se

Panel 18 schedule and abstracts pdf, 222.6 kB.

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

Panel 4 schedule and abstracts pdf, 282.4 kB.

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

Panel 16 schedule and abstracts pdf, 300.5 kB.

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

Panel 13 schedule and abstracts pdf, 271.7 kB.

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

Panel 5 schedule and abstracts pdf, 208.9 kB.

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

Panel 9 schedule and abstracts pdf, 217.4 kB.

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

The panel will offer researchers an opportunity to meet the editors of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research (NJMR) and learn more about publishing in one of the leading open-access journals in the field of migration and ethnic relations. Understand the focus of the journal and its scope, which encompasses theoretical and empirical research on migration, transnationalism, racism, belonging, border practices, and related topics, with a particular emphasis on issues relevant to the Nordic region. Ask questions concerning the editorial and peer-review process, publication expectations, and current developments in migration scholarship, while engaging in dialogue about opportunities for future submissions and special issues.

Panel 22 schedule and abstracts pdf, 230.1 kB.

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: 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.

Contact: maria.rydell@su.se