Program for August 13th

According to anthropologists, movement is a universal human activity. However, the geopolitical implications of that movement have taken on deeper social, economic, political, and cultural meanings in the past century. This presentation examines the complexities and contradictions of im/migration in the 21st century.

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 17 schedule and abstracts pdf, 270.5 kB.

Co-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

Panel 33 schedule and abstracts pdf, 235 kB.

Co-Convenors: Turid Sætermo (NTNU) & Priscilla Ringrose (NTNU)

Contact: kjelaas@ntnu.no

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

Panel 16b schedule and abstracts pdf, 233.5 kB.

Co-convenors: Sheila Ghose (Södertörn University)

A sub-theme of panel 16, this panel examines how migrants create, negotiate, and sustain spaces of solidarity, belonging, and mutual support across diverse social and geographical contexts. Everyday practices of resilience and collective care among migrant communities, focusing on issues such as integration, exclusion, identity, food justice, labour, and community-building is highlighted. The contributions discuss how migrants actively shape inclusive social spaces and forms of resistance that foster belonging, agency, and well-being despite structural inequalities and contested migration environments.

Contact: daria.tarkhova@helsinki.fi

Panel 10 schedule and abstracts pdf, 212.2 kB.

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

Panel 12 schedule and abstracts pdf, 249.4 kB.

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

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

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 17 schedule and abstracts pdf, 270.5 kB.

Co-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

Panel 2 schedule and abstracts pdf, 168.3 kB.

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

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 16b schedule and abstracts pdf, 233.5 kB.

Co-convenors: Sheila Ghose (Södertörn University)

A sub-theme of panel 16, this panel examines how migrants create, negotiate, and sustain spaces of solidarity, belonging, and mutual support across diverse social and geographical contexts. Everyday practices of resilience and collective care among migrant communities, focusing on issues such as integration, exclusion, identity, food justice, labour, and community-building is highlighted. The contributions discuss how migrants actively shape inclusive social spaces and forms of resistance that foster belonging, agency, and well-being despite structural inequalities and contested migration environments.

Contact: daria.tarkhova@helsinki.fi

Panel 16d schedule and abstracts pdf, 164.8 kB.

Co-convenors: Emy Lindberg (Linköping University)

A sub-theme of panel 16, this panel will explore how migrants and transnational families create belonging, care, and support across borders while navigating restrictive migration regimes, displacement, and racialized social contexts. Drawing on cases from Sweden, Turkey, Ghana, and Germany, the presentations will examine transnational parenting, family-making, youth migration, identity formation, and everyday strategies of resilience among migrants, refugees, and second-generation diasporic communities. The panel will highlight how relationships, care practices, and alternative forms of belonging are actively produced in contexts shaped by uncertainty, inequality, and cross-cultural mobility.

Contact: nha.nguyen@sh.se

Panel 12 schedule and abstracts pdf, 249.4 kB.

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

(N.B. In Swedish)

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

Panel 24 schedule and abstracts pdf, 229.4 kB.

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

Panel 35 schedule and abstracts pdf, 211.1 kB.

This panel brings together papers examining how migration governance is justified, communicated, and debated across contexts shaped by tensions between control, protection, public accountability, and rights. The panel explores these dynamics through studies of public attitudes toward regularisation, migration information campaigns, party-political discourse on Syrian migrants, and Africa–Europe border control. Together, the papers highlight how migration governance is shaped through political discourse, institutional practices, border policies, and public attitudes toward inclusion and exclusion. By combining diverse cases and methods, the panel contributes to broader debates on securitization, legitimacy, and the boundaries of inclusion in contemporary migration governance.

Contact: anton.ahlen@hhs.se or niclas.mansson@sh.se

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

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

Panel 23 schedule and abstracts pdf, 174.2 kB.

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

Panel 6 schedule and abstracts pdf, 220.4 kB.

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

Panel 20 schedule and abstracts pdf, 261.8 kB.

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

Panel 26 schedule and abstracts pdf, 216.3 kB.

NB 15.00-17.00 at the Multicultural Centre in Fittja, Botkyrka

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

With Gloria Ladson-Billings

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