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This paper studies the dynamics of political mobilization of two transnational organizations – Assemblea Nacional Catalana and Marea Granate – formed by Spanish/Catalan migrants in different Europe...

PurposeThis article aims to set a roadmap for an ethical programme, which we call “qualitative migration research ethics” (QMRE). It is a scoping review that maps current ethical challenges that migration scholars often face and provide guidance, while acknowledging the fact that many researchers deal with ethical issues on a case-by-case basis.Design/methodology/approachBy connecting three lines of debates – ethics in social sciences, in qualitative research and in migration studies – this article addresses the following core questions: What are the particular ethical dilemmas in qualitative migration research (QMR)? How do migration researchers deal with these ethical dilemmas? What is the role of universal ethical codes of conduct and case-by-case ethical considerations in dealing with particular situations?FindingsThis review demonstrates that special aspects of migration research context, e.g. participants' mobility, potential vulnerability and migration as a politicized issue as well as the flexible and exploratory nature of qualitative research require particular ethical awareness that cannot be sufficiently addressed by standardized guidelines.Originality/valueIt proposes that efforts to raise ethical awareness must go beyond researchers' ethical confessions or blind adherence to pre-fixed guidance. Researchers must have critical “ethical radar” before, during and after their fieldwork; not only while working on extreme and vulnerable cases but also while doing all kind of research regardless of the level of vulnerability. Last but not least, this article claims the need for including critical ethical consciousness substantially in higher education programmes at the very beginning of the research career.

The unprecedented demographic transformations due to global human mobility and its multifaceted social, political, and economic consequences in both countries of reception and origin, have motivated an increase of interest in having reliable information and deeper knowledge about migratory patterns and the subsequent accommodation of diversity issues both by policymakers and scholars. This is especially true considering that there is a general consensus that this phenomenon is a long-term trend of our more recent history, and it is featured by being complex and unpredictable while giving rise to a permanent atmosphere of uncertainty. We need methodological tools for increasing the understanding of our basic questions on why people move, why they move to certain countries rather than others, what we can do about forced migrants’ vulnerable situations, and how we can link cohesion and diversity, human rights, and security, and a long list of issues and frameworks that shape migration studies today. To have a universal toolkit for producing knowledge is almost a naive request. What we have learned after several decades of research is that migration research needs to be sited and contextualised (King, 2018), and always placed within a given process (Zapata-Barrero, 2018). Most migration-related problems have to do with how people perceive them and behave accordingly, rather than having objective value-free understandings. In other words, migration research is mostly about interpretations rather than facts. Hence, there is an importance to digging into a methodological technique that has a particular role in producing knowledge by analysing how people, institutions, and governments interpret human mobility and diversity dynamics.

As the dynamics of migration in Europe have been continuously changing, diverse empirical, theoretical, and methodological challenges have defined the landscape of migration research agenda. This chapter aims to reflect on the current state and overtime development of Qualitative Migration Research in Europe (QMR-E). For this purpose, we have conducted paper-by-paper analysis on original articles published between 2000 and 2016 in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) and Ethnic and Racial Studies (ERS), two leading peer-reviewed journals in the field of migration research. Through this overtime analysis, we mapped the continuities and changes taking place in QMR-E with respect to their qualitative research methods, designs, research sites and groups, multi-level of analysis, and topics. In this respect, we aim to identify the dominant trends and existent gaps in QMR-E literature and to invite scholars to further develop the existing research agenda as well as to engage in new research directions.

Migration is not only transforming sending, transit, and receiving countries, but also social scientific studies. The expansions of human mobility, profound demographic transformations, and their diverse social, political and economic consequences have brought unprecedented theoretical and empirical attention to the phenomenon. While migration research has relatively longer and more established tradition in US academia, its growth in European scholarship in the last three decades has been remarkable. An increasing number of scholars and journals devote their work to understanding causes and consequences, current situations, changes and continuities of migration-related issues in Europe. Moreover, the expansion of research centres and networks, undergraduate and graduate programs, conference meetings, winter and summer schools demonstrate increasing institutional visibility of migration research. For instance, IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration, and Social Cohesion), which is currently Europe’s largest network of scholars in the area of migration and integration, has grown from 19 founding member institutes in 2004 (Brus 2014) to 39 member institutes in 2017 and over 500 individual members. On the other hand, what is less evident is the systematic attention to the methodological issues in European migration studies. This edited volume presents an effort to address this gap, through the collaboration of migration scholars from diverse disciplines. It is a unique volume as it brings together a multidisciplinary perspective as well as illustrations of different issues derived from the research experience of the recognized authors.