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Els de Graauw is Professor of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Migration Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, the City ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of New York. She is interested in immigration, civil society organizations, urban politics, government bureaucracies, public policy, and qualitative research methods, with a focus on understanding how governmental and nongovernmental organizations build institutional capacity for immigrant integration and representation.

Els is the author of Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (2016), co-author of Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston (2024), and co-editor of Migrants, Minorities, and the Media: Information, Representations, and Participation in the Public Sphere (2017). For more information, click .

Abstract of Keynote lecture:

Who Is Responsible for Immigrant Integration in the United States?

In the United States, there is fierce debate about who to admit into the country as immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees and who to force out through deportation. Yet, there has been little public discussion about the societal integration of immigrants already  present.  In a country with a laissez-faire philosophy to immigrant integration that has nonetheless successfully integrated millions of newcomers over time, who in the United States is doing the work of immigrant integration, who should be responsible for it, and what are key dynamics of immigrant integration today? In this talk, Els de Graauw will discuss the patchwork of federal, state, and municipal policies and programs aimed at immigrants’ integration as well as the tremendous work of an array of nongovernmental organizations and actors to help immigrants to fully access the opportunities, rights, and services available to the native-born population. The talk will also reflect on the important challenges posed to both governmental and nongovernmental efforts to promote immigrant integration during the second Trump administration.

Valentina Mazzucato is Professor of Globalisation & Development. She founded and directed the research programme on  from 2012 to 2020.

Her expertise is on migration studied from a transnational perspective. In particular she studies the effects of migration between Africa and Europe on migrants and their families and communities back home. Mazzucato has led 5 international, multi-year projects on transnational migration between Africa and Europe in which she collaborates with European and African universities.

She helped establish and is Executive Board member of the ). She served on the Steering Committee of NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development (2017-2024) and a panel member of the ERC Advanced Grants (2017-2024). Prof. Mazzucato received a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant for the project (2017-2023). Moreover, Mazzucato is elected member of the  (KNAW), one of the highest academic distinctions in the Netherlands.

Abstract of Keynote lecture:

Playing with categories as reflexive method: the need for new categories in migration research

Critical migration scholars have warned against the perils of using categories that reify state-policy concerns when conducting migration research. At the same time, migration researchers, as any researcher, must use analytical categories to conduct any kind of analysis, be it of a qualitative or quantitative nature. In this presentation I reflect on the challenges facing migration researchers with analytical categories in quantitative analyses. I propose playing with different kinds of categories as a way of being reflexive about our research. I will exemplify this through mobility-based categories for studying young people with and without a migration background that were developed as part of the Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives project ( ). Most migrant youth research uses the categories of ethnicity, defined by the country of origin of the youth or one or both of their parents; or generation, defined as 1^st, 2^nd or 1.5 generation. But what happens if we see these youth as defined by the types and patterns of mobility that they engage in rather than migrant generation or ethnicity? Might this allow us to detect similarities between those youth who have migration in their biographies and those who do not, or to see within group differences, something that migration scholars have done less of?

 

 

Merlin Schaeffer is a professor of sociology at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Copenhagen and a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He studies how international immigration is transforming societies, currently with a particular focus on citizens’ clashing views on the definition and prevalence of discrimination. His work draws on diverse social theories and research methods to gain insights on challenges to equality and social cohesion in increasingly diverse societies. Previously, Schaeffer taught at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Cologne and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the WZB’s Migration, Integration, Transnationalization research unit. He holds a PhD from the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Amsterdam and completed his graduate and undergraduate education at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Schaeffer was a visiting scholar at Sciences Po Paris and the European ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� Institute (EUI) in Florence. He also held visiting positions at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Harvard ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. He currently serves as an associate editor of the European Sociological Review and was an associate editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2019-2023).

Abstract of Keynote lecture:

“How accurate do minority and majority members perceive the extent of ethnic discrimination?"

Theoretical and empirical scholarship on this question is rare and arguably underdeveloped. The challenge lies in comparing individuals’ perceptions and expectations of discrimination against the actual extent of discrimination. So far, we lack theoretical reasoning and a methodology to study misperceived discrimination. The current study proposes several experimental methodologies to measure misperceptions of ethnic discrimination. The first method is based on a survey experiment that measures misperceptions about the extent of discrimination in society by eliciting citizens’ beliefs about the results of field experiments testing for discrimination. The second method is based on behavioral games, such as the trust game. Prior research has extensively used behavioral games to measure name-based ethnic discrimination. We extent this line of research by exploiting the hitherto overlooked possibility to also survey perceived discrimination in terms of whether participants expect to be discriminated by their game partners. Importantly, this allows us to measure expected and actual discrimination on the same scale and to thus go beyond estimating an association and in fact present a first measure of individual’s over- and under-perceptions of ethnic discrimination they face personally. To measure perceived rather than expected discrimination more directly, the third method is based on a follow-up experiment that mimics the every-day life situation in which minorities need to decide whether they frame an anecdotal event of disadvantage as an experience of intentional discrimination. To do so, we inform participants about their average payoffs from the trust games and randomly treat them with a favorable, unfavorable, or equal comparison to the payoffs of native-named participants. We then study whether participants correctly perceive these comparisons as reflecting intentional discrimination or rather as an instance of bad luck.”