By Nilay Kılınç
Over the years, the Standing Committee on Migration, Migrants, and Labour Markets (IILME) has sought to advance research on migrant labour and labour markets across a wide range of European and transnational contexts. IILME’s work has engaged with questions concerning migrant workers and trade union representation, migrant and refugee entrepreneurship, and the relationship between migration, labour precarity and changing welfare and migration regimes. More recently, we have extended our focus towards cultures of rejection, racialised labour formations, digitalised labour markets and increasingly mobile and fragmented forms of labour organised across borders. As we have continued to follow developments within the field, we have expanded our activities and academic engagements within the IMISCOE Network and beyond to address the ways in which labour, employment and work are being reconfigured within increasingly stratified neoliberal labour markets. Particular attention has been given to how migration intersects with emerging forms of labour to produce new hierarchies of power, deepen social inequalities and generate complex challenges concerning the legal recognition and representation of workers’ rights.
In line with these developments, IILME organised a special workshop during the 22nd Annual IMISCOE Conference in 2025 (Paris–Aubervilliers & Online), convened by Lisa Berntsen and Nahikari Irastorza under the title “The Future of Research is in the Hands of Early Career Researchers.” The workshop introduced and discussed emerging areas of research concerning highly skilled migrant workers’ negotiations with citizenship regimes, racialised and unequal labour market dynamics within welfare-oriented democracies, and new forms of labour associated with platform economies and digitally mediated employment. These discussions highlighted how certain forms of work/labour remain outside conventional classifications of employment, often excluding certain workers from institutional protections and making their labour insufficiently recognised within migration governance systems. In many instances, forms of platform or gig work are not acknowledged by state institutions as legitimate evidence of employment for the purposes of securing or renewing residence permits, thereby exposing some workers, such as the third-country nationals in the EU countries, to heightened forms of insecurity and administrative precarity. Some of these emergent challenges and puzzles were reflected upon by Rinus Penninx on his piece on the IILME Blog, titled, International Migration and Employment: A Brief Survey of the IILME Domain of Studies.
Building upon this renewed research agenda, IILME will organise a special workshop at the 23rd Annual IMISCOE Conference in Girona & Online, entitled “Participatory and Activist Approaches to Migrant Labour, Precarity and Resistance”, convened by Nilay Kılınç from the University of Helsinki. The workshop’s date and time is June 30, 09:00–10:30. The workshop features a distinguished group of participants whose work spans migration studies, labour research, political sociology and activist scholarship. Contributors include Domenica Farinella from the University of Messina, Laura Stielike from Osnabrück University, Giacomo Solano from Radboud University, Maizi Hua from the University of Oslo, Lisa Berntsen from De Burcht, Scientific Research Institute for the Dutch Labour Movement and Mai Lundemark from Linnaeus University. Situated within ongoing debates in migration studies and critical labour research, the workshop seeks to explore how participatory and activist methodologies may reshape the ways migrant labour is studied, represented and politically engaged under conditions of neoliberal globalisation.
Across diverse geographical contexts, migrant workers continue to occupy some of the most precarious and socially invisibilised positions within contemporary labour markets. Transformations in work including the expansion of platform economies, gig labour, digital and social media work, informal entrepreneurship and unpaid reproductive labour, have increasingly destabilised conventional distinctions between work, labour and employment. These developments raise urgent questions concerning the ways states, employers and institutional actors classify, regulate and govern labour through legal frameworks, welfare systems, taxation regimes and mechanisms of labour protection. Migrant workers are often disproportionately affected by these arrangements also in line with regimes that classify labour as ‘high skilled’, ‘low skilled’ etc., experiencing intensified forms of precarity while simultaneously developing new forms of resistance, solidarity and collective organisation.
The workshop aims to respond to these developments by critically examining the methodological and epistemological possibilities of participatory and activist research. Migration scholarship has long grappled with the ethical and political dilemmas involved in documenting exploitation, mobility and inequality without reproducing extractive forms of knowledge production. Migrants have often been positioned as subjects of research rather than as collaborators actively shaping research agendas, interpretations and political interventions. Hence, the workshop aims to advance an alternative approach that recognises migrant workers as epistemic actors whose lived experiences, political struggles and situated knowledges are central to the research process itself.
At the core of the workshop lies the understanding that participatory and activist methodologies cannot be understood simply as research instruments. Rather they constitute forms of praxis that challenge conventional hierarchies between researchers and researched communities through processes of co-production of knowledge, reflexivity and political accountability. Through collaborative engagement, participatory research may create spaces in which migrants articulate their own experiences of labour, mobility, exclusion and resistance while simultaneously shaping the ways these experiences are interpreted and represented.
As a result, a central theme of the workshop concerns the researcher positionality and reflexivity. Participatory and activist forms of research frequently require scholars to navigate complex insider/outsider/in-betweener dynamics, processes of linguistic and cultural translation and power geometries embedded within academic institutions and activist environments alike. The workshop seeks to provide a space for critical discussion concerning the practical, political and affective/emotional challenges associated with conducting engaged scholarship within precarious and politically sensitive contexts.
At the same time, the workshop aims to foreground the solidarities and political possibilities emerging through participatory approaches. Migrant workers across different sectors and geographical settings continue to develop innovative forms of organising that challenge exclusionary labour regimes and restrictive migration policies. Grassroots trade unions, worker cooperatives, translocal organising networks and participatory policy initiatives are generating new forms of collective action and advocacy. By foregrounding these practices, the workshop seeks to broaden ongoing discussions about ‘organisations from below’ which may be less recognised or legitimised by formal institutions which nevertheless act as vital communities for transformative action, solidarity and resistance against different forms of inequality and injustice. We believe that the IILME Special Workshop has great potential to strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue within the IMISCOE network as this year’s theme focuses on community engagement in knowledge production, challenges to epistemic justice and uncovering why and how some voices are marginalised.
If you would like to engage in discussing IILME’s future activities, you are welcome to our Standing Committee meeting, date and place to be found here. Welcome to participate in IILME activities, we hope to see you in Girona.