On Thursday, February 7th, five postdoctoral researchers funded by a grant from the Migration, Mobility, and Immobility Discovery Theme facilitated a roundtable discussion on Interdisciplinary Methods for Migration Studies. Sona Hill, Harry Kashdan, Moriah Flagler, and Danielle V. Schoon discussed their experiences and challenges with particular methodologies for studying migration and mobility in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. After brief presentations, the audience participated in a lively, open discussion about the integration of methods and practices across disciplines, particularly innovative methods and practices that can have a social impact.

Sona Hill is a postdoctoral researcher of global migration, medical humanities, and disability studies in the department of English, where she conducts research on transnational regimes of power and ideology such as war, displacement, and incarceration that create disability. Sona discussed: What is axiology? Participatory research versus emancipatory research: A research that helps or a research that hurts.

Harry Kashdan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Global Mediterranean. Harry discussed strategies for close reading cookbooks, with attention to how cookbooks index histories of migration, and the tension between their status as historical archives and and the possibility of treating them as literary texts. 

Danielle V. Schoon is a cultural anthropologist and a previous postdoc in the Global Mediterranean. She is now a full-time lecturer in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Sociology, and Political Science. Danielle spoke about her ethnographic research with a vulnerable community in Istanbul, Turkey, and the ‘communities of practice’ model for collective research.

Moriah Flagler is a postdoctoral researcher in the departments of Theatre and Comparative Studies and the Artistic Director of Be the Street. Moriah discussed how her work uses grounded theory with a flexible research question to see what communities bring to the work. She is also working to decolonize research by positioning young people as co-researchers.

Image Credit: Danielle V. Schoon. Pictured from left to right are Moriah Flagler, Harry Kashdan, Danielle V. Schoon and Sona Hill.