Forced Migration and Displacement in Higher Education

Abstract

Academic migration has traditionally been conceptualized as a form of voluntary mobility, framed around ideas of knowledge transfer, institutional prestige, and cosmopolitan citizenship. However, contemporary geopolitical instabilities, deepening global inequalities, and restrictive migration regimes are radically reshaping higher education landscapes. While critical scholarship increasingly highlights how intersectional inequalities, legal precarity, and spatial politics marginalize internationally mobile academics, these vulnerabilities become most acute for forcibly displaced students and scholars. Displaced individuals face profound structural barriers, ranging from the epistemic exclusion and fractured professional trajectories experienced by exiled researchers to the procedural, financial, and institutional hurdles confronting displaced students. Despite these challenges, displacement also acts as a catalyst for novel forms of mobilization, agency, and transnational solidarity.

This two-day workshop is convened by the University of Trento and it is co-funded by the Department of Sociology and Social Research, the SPaRe Lab, the Caritro Foundation and the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Education and Social Inequality. It aims to foster an interdisciplinary, cross-contexts analysis that bridges theoretical reflections, methodological innovations, and policy implications. Crucially, the workshop aims to bring into the same analytical framework experiences of both forcibly displaced scholars and students. Rather than flattening their distinct realities, the workshop proposes a relational approach to illuminate the overarching structural conditions at the intersection of displacement and higher education. Ultimately, the workshop aims to achieve three interconnected goals: to spark a timely debate across migration and higher education studies, to establish a collaborative and enduring research community, and to engage in an act of collective reflexivity.

Organizing Committee
 

Ahmad Akkad, Department of Education University of Oxford
Chiara Bassetti, DSRS and SPaRe Lab University of Trento 
Thais França, ISCTE-Lisbon
Ester Gallo, DSRS and SPaRe Lab University of Trento
Cristina Mazzero, DSRS University of Trento
Monica Tassaduque, DSRS University of Trento