Migration > Aktiviteter > Migrationsinitiativets seminarer > Figuring out migrants

Figuring out migrants and making research count:
On the uses and abuses of quantitative methods in migration research

Time and place
October 28
CSS, Øster Farimagsgade 5
1353 Copenhagen
Room 16.1.62 (see map)

Registration
Please contact Kirsten Gelting for registration

Participants
Margit Warburg, University of Copenhagen (On counting burkas)
Vibeke Jakobsen, SFI (On methodological problems in surveying migrants)- tbc
Zachary Whyte, University of Copenhagen (On metrics in the Danish asylum system)
Allan Krasnik, Folkesundhedsvidenskab, University of Copenhagen (On the use of quantitative data in health care for migrants)
Wiebke Sievers, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Dennis Broeders, Scientific Council for Government Policies, Holland

Background for the workshop
Numbers are increasingly used to know migrants across a wide spectrum of migration research. This raises important questions about methodology, the political and institutional uses of quantitative data, and about the consequences of these approaches for the daily lives of individual migrants. Figures are said to map, to reveal, to show all manner of things about migration and mobile people. They are used to track and define a wide range of migrant attributes, from demographics, rates of employment, national origin, and economics, to religiosity, health, democratic and national loyalty, and criminality. However, the sheer mass of statistics produced on migration precludes any systematic verification of the numbers presented, and regularly leaves unexamined the categorizations that shape the questions asked. Similarly, the cross-references of qualitative and quantitative approaches are often not sufficiently developed.

Metrics are also increasingly important to the institutions that regulate and care for migrants. Institutions and authorities (which in Denmark range from the Red Cross to language schools and hospitals) make contracts with state employers, specifying quantifiable levels of goal fulfillment. But they also use numeric data to guide their daily work with migrants. These institutions thus at once produce and rely on quantitative representations of the migrants they manage, which in turn often form the basis for broader political and public debates about migrants.

This of course has consequences for migration research in at least two ways: first, research is more likely to be heard and implemented if it conforms to these numeric standards; second, research is increasingly commissioned by state and institutional actors precisely to produce actionable numbers. However, this production of quantitative knowledge about migration also has direct repercussions for the every day lives of migrants, since this "figuring out" of migrants guides the institutions and authorities they interact with.
This numeric focus in not unique to the field of migration, but rather reflects wider tendencies in statecraft. As Foucault has noted the etymological roots of state and statistics are the same. Nevertheless, these metrics have distinct consequences in the field of migration, where a number of factors at once make the gathering of figures more problematic and their political uses more pronounced.

This research workshop will bring together migration scholars from a spectrum of disciplines to examine the practice and consequences of figuring out migrants. The papers presented will do so from various angles, synthesizing methodological experiences of surveying migrants with more theoretical approaches to the kinds of knowledge statistics generate about migrants. This in turn will allow us to think more clearly about the political uses of these metrics, and to see how they are experienced by individual migrants. Together these papers will not only provide a critical commentary on the current uses of quantitative data in "figuring out" migrants, but also point towards more fruitful approaches to making migration research count.

Animated discussions of the papers presented will be fundamental to the success of the workshop, relying as it does on the synthesis of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject. Therefore qualified discussants at various stages of their research careers will also be invited. The papers presented may usefully be gathered in an edited volume or a special edition of a journal, such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, as the subject has a broad and under-researched relevance to contemporary migration studies.