Next week, the University of Birmingham will welcome researchers, practitioners, activists and policy professionals for the IRiS International Conference 2026, Unsettling Communities: Diversity, Mobility and Displacement in an Age of Growing Authoritarianism.
Taking place from 7 to 9 September, the conference comes at a moment when migration and diversity have become central terrains of political contestation. Across different settings, we are witnessing intensifying border violence, increasingly selective mobility regimes, the erosion of asylum and international protection, and the mainstreaming of racialised and exclusionary politics. The conference asks how research can respond to these transformations without reproducing dominant framings of migration as crisis, threat or invasion, and what concepts, methods and alliances are needed to understand and contest the current moment.
The scale of the response to our call has been remarkable. The conference will bring together speakers across 26 panels, five workshops, two plenaries, two semi-plenaries, a roundtable and a dedicated PhD day. Participants joins from 24 countries across four continents.
The full conference programme and book of abstracts are now available online.
We look forward to three days of critical discussion, exchange and collective reflection.
The Age of Superdiversity 
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