IMER Research Platform

The main themes in IMER Bergen’s current research platform include:

1) Politics, Law, and Mobilities:  This theme covers the interplays between politics and different types of mobilities. “Politics” here comprises political competition, legislative processes, law enforcement, policies, administrative practices, and attitudes concerning political asylum, migration, citizenship, culture, diversity, welfare, and formations of new urban spaces. Examples of sub-themes:

• Diversity and Citizenship: Comprises whether diversity necessitates new notions about political life, most prominently in citizenship and public sphere; religion and secularism.
• Borders and Boundaries: Includes processes of inclusion and exclusion through the construction and control of spaces, the changing meaning and function of borders, and the sociology of movement.
• Political mobilization: Explores who the legitimate participants of the public debates are, and which views are accepted. Broaden the conventional perspective on politics by studying transnational publics, subaltern publics and counter-publics.

2) Migration, Ethnic Relations and Inequality: This theme aims to increase our understanding of how patterns of migration are shaped by complex historical structures of inequality, and also create new and challenge existing inequalities globally as well as locally. It also addresses complex power relations and how inequalities are constructed and upheld at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class etc.  Examples of sub-themes:

• Legal status and precariousness: Addresses the implication of increased legal fragmentation in refugee protection and migration governance, including its temporal dimension.
• Emerging Urbanities: Covers the plural city, urban minority/migrant life, multicultural youth in the city, housing segregation, and camps.
• Gender: Research in the intersection of gender and migration.
• Decolonial perspectives: Research on how colonial structures have shaped and continue to inform ethnic and racial relations today.
• Everyday negotiations of belonging: Research on migrants’ lived experiences of home, belonging and membership. 
• Power and Inequality in Education: Research on processes of inclusion and exclusion in educational systems, policies and practices.

3) Globalization and Mobilities: This theme comprises efforts to theorize the interplays between globalization and mobilities. In this context, “globalization” means the emergence of global cleavage structures and global actors and transnational networks as key players in regional and national political and social relations. Examples of sub-themes: 

• Transnational activism and social movements
• Global Cleavage Theory