The question which relationships qualify as ‘family’ in migration policy is key to defining who gets to legally migrate to and reside in Europe. It is central to family migration politics obviously, but plays a crucial role in other aspects of migration regime as well, including the governance of forced migration, labour migration, detention, and deportation. Dominant family norms also play a crucial role in the intersection of migration regimes with welfare regimes. But who decides what a ‘proper’ family is? Or what families are ‘deserving’ enough to belong here?

This summer school invites PhD researchers to critically explore legacies and dis/continuities of coloniality in citizenship- and migration politics in Europe. Participants will critically engage with the legacies of (methodological) whiteness and racism in migration studies, dis/continuities between colonial mobility governance and contemporary migration politics, and their own positionalities and roles in knowledge production systems.

This panel series explores the role of family norms and imaginaries of intimacy in migration regimes and sheds light on the ways in which not only state actors but also intermediaries engage in “moral gatekeeping” practices that either (re)produce, diverge from or contest norms.

This is a collaborative anglophone/francophone workshop, organised by the Institut Convergences Migrations, the Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris (CRESPPA) & the Stranger Families Project at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). In this workshop, we aim to further the work on affect and racialisation within contemporary politics of citizenship and migration.

We explored how families are regulated and racialized in migration policies and welfare policies in a panel at the European Conference on Politics and Gender, held 6-8 July 2022 in Ljubljana.

What role do lawyers, activists, and migrant support networks play in contesting, deconstructing and/or upholding norms surrounding citizenship, asylum, family migration, deportability and illegalization of migrants? We organised a panel series on this theme at the the CES conference held in Lisbon in June 2022.

During the 2021 academic conference of the Council for European Studies, our team convened a panel that explored political contestation over family migration rights for non-normative families aspiring to live in Europe.

In cooperation with the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies, the Stranger Families team has organized an online lecture series titled “Race and Migration - scholarship in between, on and beyond the borders”. From January to June 2021, the series invites speakers and the audience to reflect on the historical divides and bridges between race and migration scholarship in Europe.