7-9 September, University of Birmingham
The Call of Papers is now closed.
Confirmed plenary speakers include:
- Zoe Bantleman (immigration barrister)
- Professor Ernesto Castaneda (American University, Washington DC)
- Dr Ida Danewid (Sussex University)
- Professor Jonathan Darling (Durham University)
- Professor Ipek Demir (University of Leeds)
- Professor Adrian Favell (University College Cork)
- Dr Amani Hassani (Brunel, University of London)
- Professor Rachel Humphris (Queen Mary, University of London)
- Dr Lucy Mayblin (University of Sheffield)
- Dr Julia Suarez-Krabbe (Roskilde University)
- Dr Peter Walsh (Migration Observatory, University of Oxford)
Check out the Outline Programme
We are living in times where profound and intersecting geopolitical, economic, environmental and ideological crises are shaping diversity, mobility and displacement. Armed conflicts and protracted wars — from Ukraine to Gaza —continue to displace millions, while climate breakdown, a widespread drift towards authoritarian rhetoric and far-right politics alongside economic collapse drive large-scale mobility and immobility across and within regions, including from Venezuela, across the Sahel, and throughout Central America. The current world order is thus increasingly characterised by change and instability. These changes have major ramifications including intensifying border violence, the introduction of increasingly selective mobility regimes and the erosion of international protection frameworks. Faced with this disruption, political and activist communities are forging new alliances across difference and mobilising in radical new ways to re-imagine collective power and belonging.
Globally, migration has become a central terrain of political contestation. Anti-immigration politics, resurgent racisms and exclusionary nationalisms are increasingly mainstreamed, accompanied by the targeting of racialised citizens and migrants through policing, surveillance, welfare restriction and labour market control. In the US, renewed violent attacks on migrants and their allies, the expansion of enforcement and detention, and assaults on DEI initiatives signal a broader backlash against those perceived as non-white. In Europe and the UK, similar dynamics unfold through externalisation, border violence, deterrence, and the normalisation of emergency governance.
These developments coincide with sustained attacks on international human rights norms and institutions, including the UN refugee regime, the humanitarian work of WHO and IOM, humanitarian law and the principle of asylum itself. The result is a deeply uneven landscape of mobility and immobility, where protection is increasingly conditional, racialised and politicised and the wellbeing of the mobile and the immobilised is undermined.
In this context, the study of diversity, migration and displacement is both more urgent and more challenging than ever.
- How can scholarship respond to these transformations without reproducing dominant framings of crisis, threat or invasion?
- What concepts, methods and alliances are needed to understand—and contest—this moment?
The themes of the conference speak to IRIS’s core research concerns around diversity, belonging, mobility and displacement, understood as historically grounded, politically contested and unevenly lived.
The conference will include plenaries, semi-plenaries, panels and workshops. Parallel panels and workshops will be allocated a 90-minute slot.
Conference fees, travel and accommodation will be covered by participants. Concessions are available for PhD researchers, activists, practitioners and people directly affected by the issues under discussion, including asylum seekers and refugees.
For further information, please contact School of Social Policy and Society Event Team: spsevents@contacts.bham.ac.uk
The Age of Superdiversity 