I den här texten intervjuas fyra migrationsforskare om det senaste valresultatet. I texten resonerar deltagarna kring hur förhållandena på deras respektive expertområden (medborgarskap, mänskliga rättigheter, vidarebosättning och anhöriginvandring) förändrats under den senaste mandatperioden, och om vad de vill respektive tror kommer att ske under den mandatperiod som kommer.

In 2022, Sweden introduced new refugee selection guidelines prioritizing women and girls-a departure from earlier practices focused solely on vulnerability. Through a problem representation analysis, this article examines parliamentary motions on resettlement from 2015 to 2022, exploring how gender, im/mobility, religion, and vulnerability shape notions of deservingness. It argues that gender is-intentionally or not-used as a governance tool, reflecting a broader migration policy shift of not only framing men and asylum seekers as a problem but creating the grounds for weakening rights-based approaches in favour of a more humanitarian approach to migration governance driven by compassion but also control.

This chapter discusses the possibilities of ethnographic film for studying migration and movement due to conflict. It is based on anthropological fieldwork and a long-term ethnographic film in progress called “Bread and Salt,” featuring 26 years of footage. The film starts in Little Waterfall, a remote village in Syria’s Aleppo province, introducing two cousins and their families, as well as the anthropologist’s role in the village. After a massacre in 2013, some villagers became refugees in Europe, while others were displaced within Syria. Through the application of anthropological methods, such as participant observation, interviews and ethnographic film, the initial research field in one locality, shifted to a multi-sited, translocal and transnational field by necessity, because of the impact of the Syrian war. The film shows the filmmaker searching for missing villagers in northern Syria and reuniting with family in the Netherlands and Germany. The final part depicts life after fleeing, highlighting family reunification and the impact of the Syrian regime's fall in 2024, exploring the ethical issues faced during research. Through a translocal lens this chapter offers reflections both on how im-mobilities influenced the methods, positionalities of researcher and the ethical dilemmas that emerged within these conflict dynamics.

Borders are not just lines on a map. They are social, political, and symbolic practices that shape how we live, move, and belong. Whether materialized as fences and checkpoints or enacted through technologies, discourses, and everyday encounters, borders are constantly made and remade. This special section explores how borders emerge through processes of inclusion and exclusion, control, and identity-making, and how they are also resisted, negotiated, and subverted. Drawing on rich empirical material and critical theoretical tools, the contributions of the special section of this issue of CIMR collectively push the field of border and migration studies toward a deeper understanding of bordering as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon.

Migration studies is the multi- and interdisciplinary field devoted to examining and explaining causes, experiences, and impacts of human mobility. Researchers studying migration face a plenitude of ethical challenges, especially in studies on or with “vulnerable populations”—people that are in dire legal, economic, or psychological circumstances, or of young age. However, there are more general normative imperatives deriving from the field’s traditionally close relationship to the nation-state system and the international refugee regime. Because migration studies is an academic field with direct societal relevance, its research findings often have the potential to influence policy decision-making, which renders migration scholars in a powerful position to exert influence on how societal resources are distributed. Although these circumstances clearly call for a strong ethical framework throughout the research process, from proposal writing to dissemination, normative considerations have only been observed in some parts of the field. Ethical considerations are most pronounced in methodological inquiries, and issues of representation and labelling as well as the researcher’s positionality have also received significant attention. Nonetheless, many ethical considerations remain generally implicit rather than explicit. However, a growing “critical” and “reflexive” migration scholarship has been increasingly calling into question the close relationship between academia and the nation-state and pointing at the pitfalls of unreflexive scholarship. The focus of these migration scholars on power inequalities in the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as on the effects of policy-oriented research, can be read as an ethical imperative for good scholarship.

Participatory action research, or PAR, is a research design that is led or co-designed by participants who have lived experience and are impacted by the research topic, and who are positioned to benefit, whether materially, epistemologically, or historically, from any outcomes or interventions resulting from an investigation. PAR is used in migration research both in its ideal form, and in more pragmatic participatory approaches that draw from elements of the PAR principles. In migration research, academics must often balance the ideals of PAR with the realities of institutional funding and timelines to ensure false promises are not made and pathways to social change are not compromised. Despite ethical and political challenges, migration studies in general can benefit from a more democratized balance of knowledge production and validation, which can be achieved through PAR.

Children are often regarded as ‘dependents’ within migration studies, rendering their care work invisible. Drawing on the ethics of care, this paper analyses young people's active roles in caring for family members in Sweden and the UK and for transnational kin, based on qualitative and participatory research with young people (aged 6–25). Many young people provided emotional support, language brokering and practical assistance to navigate care, welfare and immigration systems. Some young people engaged in higher levels of caregiving, often linked to inadequate formal care resources and the absence of a parent or extended kin who would usually be expected to provide care. Caregiving was often accompanied by gendered and inter- and intra-generational conflicts, which could impact on young people's wellbeing and competence to provide ‘good care’. More awareness is needed of young people's crucial roles in filling the gaps in care, welfare and migration regimes in transnational spaces.