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On 19 and 20 June, the bi-annual UU Migration and Societal Change conference took place. It was very large and dynamic. With three keynotes, 74 panels and around 400 participants from all over the world, it dealt with a broad variety of dimensions and approaches of migration, such as migration and work, environmental aspects of migration, technology and migration, postcolonial aspects of migration, and migration, story-telling and the arts.

Reflections by Daan van Arcken

On the Thursday morning June 19, the second Migration and Societal Change Conference opened at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ - and what a powerful start it was.

From the moment Prof. Dina Siegel opened the day with her call to approach migration as a dynamic and deeply political process, it was clear that this conference would not shy away from complexity. Migration, she reminded us, is shaped by power structures and must be understood across disciplines - from history and law to sociology, media, and the arts.

Two keynotes, two very different entry points — and a common urgency

The first keynote by Prof. Merlin Schaeffer challenged us to rethink how we perceive discrimination. He presented data showing that both majority and minority populations often misperceive levels of discrimination - sometimes overestimating, sometimes underestimating - and how those perceptions are shaped by personal experiences, media exposure, and systemic inequality. The talk invited us to consider the consequences of these misperceptions: on trust, public debate, and ultimately, policy.

Then came Vamba Sherif, who turned the academic lens on its head. Through storytelling, poetry, and a letter from a young African migrant to European leaders, he offered a deeply human perspective on migration. As a journey marked by hope, frustration, silence, and resilience. He spoke of historical plundering and present-day exclusion, and made a powerful case for literature as a tool for empathy and political change.

Panels: from dreams and decisions to staying put

In the afternoon, I joined two of the many parallel panel sessions. The first, on Migration Dreams and Reality, focused on how aspirations shape migration decisions - and how the gap between imagined futures and lived realities often reveals deeper structures of inequality. What stood out was the attention to agency: migrants are not simply responding to conditions, but actively navigating them, often with creativity and persistence.

The second panel I attended - (Non-)Migration and Intergenerational Livelihood Resilience - explored what happens when people »å´Ç²Ô’t move. It was a much-needed reminder that staying can be just as intentional and complex as leaving. Researchers shared cases from across the globe, showing how land, kinship, climate pressures, and generational roles all influence decisions to remain rooted. It made me reflect on how policies and public debates often frame mobility as inevitable - when in fact, people’s attachments and obligations are just as important as their aspirations.

A rich and varied programme

Of course, these sessions were just a small glimpse of everything happening throughout the day. The full programme offered a wide range of panels on topics such as urban belonging, border control technologies, solidarity and contestation, and gendered narratives of migration. I wish I could have joined them all. Judging from the hallway conversations and lively discussions, each session brought unique insights and new questions to the table.

Reflections by Jos Philips

I hereby share some impressions, focusing on the keynotes, and on some parallel sessions of mainly the second day. In the plenary morning sessions, Merlin Schaeffer first presented research findings concerning ‘experienced discrimination’ and ‘actual discrimination’ as modelled by a game. Using quantitative data from Germany, he thereby discussed a less studied aspect of discrimination. One finding was that people’s previous experiences with discrimination heavily influence how much discrimination they expect, which will often be too much or too little. In the second keynote, the novelist Vamba Sherif drew attention to the migrants’ own sides of the story of migration. Sherif addressed the audience with a fictional letter from an African fisherman, who is determined –after his livelihood has been taken away by trawlers– to make it into Europe and to work very hard there, in order to help his mother and other family. The fisherman remains determined even though walls are built and political parties set up in Europa to keep him out. Sherif’s narrative art kept the audience in thrall and moved their empathy. Thirdly, Valentina Mazzucato’s Friday keynote argued how migration researchers tend to get stuck in established categories, such as ‘countries of origin’, ‘first -’ and ‘second generation’, ‘refugee’, and indeed also ‘migrant’ itself. Such categories –some of them policy categories, which may or may not be the most apt for research– influence the questions asked, the data collected, etc., thus potentially creating vicious cycles. Mazzucato argued for greater playfulness with our analytical categories and for thinking in terms of mobility instead of migration. She illustrated this by her group’s research into mobility, which maps the dynamic movements across place of young people, especially investigating their visits to their home countries.

The afternoons of both days had numerous parallel panels. I can only give a small taste of these, based on the ones I participated in. Themes varied widely. One panel discussed climate resilience and migration plans (mostly of the young rather than the old) of indigenous people. Another discussed migrants’ cuisines as a locus of identity and a sense of home and even as a means for conciliation of conflicts between different groups from a country – through the appreciation of each other’s food. There was a panel setting out an agenda for the ethics/philosophy of migration and arguing, among other things, for studying the daily ethics of civil servants and other agents of justice, and pointing out the need for historical awareness, and for not isolating migration from a broader understanding of the state and borders as materialities and categories of inclusion and exclusion. Another panel critically discussed ‘climate migrant’ as an emerging legal category and the (un)desirability of a climate passport, and yet another looked into the experiences of highly educated migrants, and the associated ‘brain drain’, ‘ - gain’ and ‘- waste’.

The discussions and atmosphere during the conference were outstanding. One thing that stood out for me content-wise is the great importance of empathy, for other sides of the story. As a poem by Warsan Shire (quoted by Vamba Sherif) strongly puts it: ‘no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark’. At the same time, it is not at all easy to shape, or even conceive of, institutions that can really do justice to that empathy – and to the related ideas, so fundamental to a great variety of worldviews, of human dignity and human equality.

These two days were packed with thought-provoking, bridge-building intellectual exchanges, which were both deepening and widening. A warm thanks to everyone who made it possible!