14th Migration Research Lab: “Researching Migration in contentious times: Methodology, ethics and dissemination consinderations”

26.05.2026, 14:00-16:00 CEST
Venue: Graduates School of Humanities Göttingen, Friedländer Weg 2, Room: R 0.101
(in individual cases it will be possible to join via Zoom)

Please register until 20.05.2026 via the form below.

This research lab will allow participants to engage in a discussion about how to conduct research on migration during current contentious times. In recent years, the world has seen the rise of right-wing ideologies and political parties, the harshening of immigration controls, and the scapegoating of migrants for a wide variety of society's problems. We as researchers have to navigate these conditions, considering (1) how best to represent and protect our research populations, (2) when to speak up and how, and (3) how to manage our career trajectories. These are complex and intervowen considerations that we will explore together. Considering the current political climate, we will discuss ways of adapting methodologies and dissemination of research to ensure ethical practice and the safety of ourselves and our research populations.
Dr. Amanda Lubit will kick off the event with an input based on her own research experiences about issues of racism with women refugees and asylum seekers living in sectarian Northern Ireland. In the past two years they have experienced an escalation in racist violence associated with sectarian paramilitaries and right-wing groups yet tolarated by police, politicaians and other public institutions. In this situation, she had to consider the topics that will be discussed, haveing to fear for the safety of herself and her participants while wanting the research to have an impact on current conditions.

Dr. Amanda Lubit is visiting the Centre for Global Migration through the spring of 2027 as a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) Post-Doctoral Fellow with Dublin City University. For the past year, she has been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Amanda is a socio-cultural anthropologist focusing on the related topics of gender, visibility, identity, belonging, care, mobility, and place-making. She also has experience with creative forms of embodied ethnography (e.g. walking and artistic expression). She is affiliated with the Centre for Creative Ethnography, and is increasingly connecting her academic research with her personal fiber arts practice.
Her current 3-year project uses the analytical concept of “care” to identify how women refugees and asylum seekers across Ireland understand and cope with crises. This research builds upon her PhD from Queen’s University Belfast (2023) which examined how migrant Muslim women establish a sense of belonging and place in post-conflict Belfast (Northern Ireland). That research is now available open access from Berghahn Books: Life as a Migrant Muslim Woman in Sectarian Northern Ireland.
Amanda Lubit is originally from the USA and previously earned master’s degrees in anthropology (Portland State University) and public health (Tufts University). Her research interests developed out of prior applied anthropological work on HIV/AIDS, addiction, mental health, homelessness, pandemics, environmental disaster, and displacement.



Here you can register for the 14th Migration Research Lab: “Researching Migration in contentious times: Methodology, ethics and dissemination consinderations” (26.05.2026)