Welcome to the LIDC Migration Leadership Team Blog
Hello, and welcome to the very first London International Development Centre – Migration Leadership Team blog! The LIDC-MLT was established by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council to develop a strategy for funding research on migration that brings together the social sciences, humanities and arts, promotes effective and equitable partnerships, and seeks to generate lasting impact. The Team is led by SOAS University of London, with partners at Queen Mary University London and the University College London Institute of Education.
Over the past year, we have been conducting a series of Migration Conversations with academics, artists, practitioners, policy makers, diplomats, migrant communities, and others. We have met in Delhi, India; Nairobi, Kenya; at the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, and the IMISCOE conference in Barcelona. We are now busy preparing further conversations in London, Glasgow, Brussels, New York, Beirut and a site in Latin America.
These conversations have been enormously enlightening to us. We have heard about the challenges of conducting migration and displacement research in regions where research funding is not often easily available, where security threats make research dangerous, and where polarised political opinions make it difficult to deliver impact through the mere provision of evidence.
But we have also been inspired by fascinating accounts of how the arts and research have been used together in creative ways to shed light on aspects of migration that are often overlooked. We are enjoying putting people in touch with one another, and hope that this work is already paying off in terms of people forging collaborative and creative links with one another on the basis of having met at one of our events.
We are really excited to be launching this blog series, with which we hope to invite even more conversations about migration. The series will feature viewpoints from some of those who have attended our events, or whose work we have discovered and been inspired by.
In our interactions, we are asking three basic questions:
- What are the areas of migration research that you would really love to see funded?
- What ideas do you have, based on experiences of what has worked (or even what has not worked) for generating impact from migration research?
- How can we work to ensure that international research relationships are as equitable and effective as possible?
We would love to hear from you if you have perspectives or experiences that you would like to share in this forum.
Be sure to also have a look at the rest of our website – including fantastic artwork, reports of our past Migration Conversations, and very soon other goodies! And do follow us on Twitter at @migration_team!