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Reflexive Migration Studies has emerged as a subfield of Migration Studies. Drawing on moral economy perspectives, we explore how the entanglement of, and tensions between, moral and economic rationalities shape the development of a field of knowledge production in which we ourselves partake. Clearly, Reflexive Migration Studies has not emerged in a vacuum but through socio-material practices and in a specific scientific context and community. Using the case of the Migration Studies landscape in Germany, we suggest that a moral economies perspective allows us to examine the production of knowledge infrastructures, scholarly identities, and research outputs that are key in creating a new academic field. By scrutinizing these infrastructures, identities, and outputs, we point to tensions between some of the morally charged claims and the material conditions and labour contexts of doing Reflexive Migration Studies. With our contribution, we want to raise questions regarding the direction that we, as scholars participating in the field, are taking. We see the risk that the critique brought forward in Reflexive Migration Studies falters in light of prevailing economies of scientific knowledge production and academic labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines developments along the central Mediterranean border, following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in EUrope. In response to the pandemic, EU member states enacted emergency legislation, further curtailing movements across borders. Italy and Malta declared their harbours "unsafe" for migrant arrivals, withdrew rescue operations, and installed offshore detention facilities. Though ostensibly enacted in the name of "saving lives", these measures had the opposite effect. The article assesses how border violence has become justified by reference to the pandemic, what we call the "Covid excuse". We highlight how people on the move were subjected to both biopolitical and necropolitical modalities of control through pushbacks, offshore containment and abandonment. Instead of being exceptional, we argue, these measures must be situated in longer continuities of EUropean border violence. We also discuss how people on the move are not only shaped by racialized border violence but enact fugitive practices of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the activism in the Sahara region aimed at protecting the rights of migrants during their journeys to North Africa. Despite facing challenges in a hostile political environment and the criminalization of migrant transportation, activists have launched initiatives like Alarme Phone Sahara to raise awareness, document risks and accidents, and provide assistance to people in distress.

This article explores the figure of the "migrant slave" that appears to conjoin antithetical notions—migration, often associated with intentionality and movement, and slavery, commonly associated with coercion and confinement. The figure of the migrant as slave has been frequently mobilized by "antitrafficking crusaders" in debates over unauthorized forms of trans-Mediterranean crossings to EUrope. Besides scrutinizing the depoliticized and dehistoricized ways in which contemporary migrant journeys have come to be associated with imaginaries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this article draws other, actual, comparisons between historic slavery and contemporary forms of migration. It argues that there does exist a historical resonance between the former and the latter. By remembering slave rebellions on land and at sea, the article makes the case that if one had to draw comparisons between historic slaves and contemporary migrants, beyond often crude visual associations, one would need to do so by enquiring into moments in which both enacted escape to a place of perceived freedom. It is shown that the fugitive slave escaping on the "underground railroad" resembles most closely the acts of escape via the Mediterranean and its "underground seaways" today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]