Migration and Diversity

“I Thought I Had Left That ‘Where Are You From?’ Stuff Behind”: Racialized Participation and Strategic Navigation in Teacher Education

Üzeyir Tireli — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article investigates how female students with ethnic minority backgrounds experience and navigate the social relations and interactions that emerge in their encounters with Danish classmates in a teacher education program in Denmark. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the article analyzes qualitative interview data from sixteen students who, despite their diverse cultural and social backgrounds, share common experiences of being othered, singled out, and made visible within the social dynamics of the study environment. The analysis reveals that these students’ interactions with Danish peers are shaped by a series of ambivalent experiences. In some contexts, they are met with professional and social recognition; in others, they encounter stereotypical expectations, academic marginalization, and ethnic othering—experiences that mirror broader societal patterns beyond the teacher education setting. To navigate these contradictions, the students develop various strategic, relationally embedded ways of positioning themselves within the everyday life of the program. This process is conceptualized through the notion of racialized situational competence, an analytical tool that captures these navigational practices not merely as reactive coping mechanisms but as expressions of reflective and tactical agency. It highlights how students actively manage participation and recognition within a normatively structured and asymmetrical social space.

Digital discords and digital othering: How social media practices in the diaspora mimic the home-grown social inequalities among the Indian migrants in Germany

Amrita Datta, Arani Basu, Amrita Rudra — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Media play a pivotal role in the construction of transnational social fields, immigrants’ experiences in host countries, and diaspora formation. This is specifically true for contemporary migration, in which social media through digital platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp increasingly play transformational roles by acting as a link between the immigrants’ onsite activities and their online practices. In light of this, this study focuses on the newly emerging diaspora of Indian immigrants in Germany, who arrive as international students and European Union Blue Card holders. Our objective in this paper is to examine their transnational media consumption practices and understand how the online-onsite interface informs the formation of an emerging Indian diaspora in Germany. Through fieldwork conducted in multiple German cities with a strong presence of Indians, this paper argues that social media enables the digital transportation of domestic social biases, identity politics, and other political divides quicker than earlier, thereby creating more fragmentation and ambivalence in the diaspora from its inception. Social media practices of newly arriving and evolving immigrant communities like the Indians in Germany already mimic the social inequalities played out in their home countries, contributing to the perpetuation of othering and social marginalization across the transnational social fields and within the diaspora. We call this “digital othering” produced by “digital discords” witnessed in transnational media consumption that migration studies must pay attention to.

Do Migrants Transfer Political Norms?

Nadia Eldemerdash — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Migration scholars debate whether migration can induce or contribute to the democratization of sending countries through financial and social processes. Focusing on the effects of migration on individuals, I address this debate by asking two questions. First, do migrants transfer norms to people in their country of origin, and do those norms differ based on whether their country of residence is or is not a democracy? To answer these questions, I conduct a unique survey of Arab migrants around the world to examine their interactions with their families and their political and social beliefs as they relate to their country of origin. I find that there is a systematic difference in the attitudes and behaviors of migrants living in democracies—they are more likely to discuss politics with people in their country of origin and more supportive of democracy and liberal values than those living in autocratic countries.

Re-counting Migrant Women’s Invisibility: Feminist Interventions and the Gendered Foundations of Migration Studies

Carla De Tona — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article traces the intellectual development of feminist migration studies, charting the field’s transformation from the invisibility of women in early migration research through the foundational work of the 1980s and 1990s, the transnational analyses of the 2000s, and the critical and intersectional approaches of the 2010s and 2020s. It examines how feminist scholarship redefined migration as a gendered, relational, and embodied process, revealing how women’s movements, labour, and care practices both sustain and transform global systems of mobility, belonging, and power. By foregrounding women’s reproductive, care, and affective labour, feminist theorists re-signified what counts as work and value, exposing the intimate foundations of global capitalism. More recent contributions in intersectional and critical border studies reveal how gender, race, class, and citizenship intersect to produce stratified regimes of mobility and control. The article concludes by revisiting the enduring tension between agency and constraint, proposing it as a key interpretive lens for understanding how migrant women navigate and transform structures of domination. Recounting women’s historical invisibility thus remains not only a historiographical task but an epistemological and political intervention in how migration continues to be studied, governed, and imagined.