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In most partner countries, research on migration (both emigration, immigration and transit migration) has tended to progress from more general quantitative to more context specific and fine tuned qualitative studies, deploying a variety of research methods based on ethnographic, narrative and discourse analytic methodologies, such as participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews and life histories. Such approaches are considered conducive towards developing a gendered understanding of migration and integration processes that integrates macro and micro perspectives of analysis while foregrounding migrants’ agency, and are prioritized by all partners as most appropriate for the thematic areas addressed by the Ge.M.IC. project.
Particularly for more sensitive topics, such as gendered violence, the importance of accessing the subjects’ own unmediated accounts as well as avoiding the uncritical reproduction of gendered and racialized stereotypes is considered paramount for stopping their further victimization and marginalization. On questions of intercultural interaction, partners highlight the need to problematize essentialist, static and homogeneous notions of culture, in parallel with the deconstruction of mainstream representations of migration as a social threat, in order to address problems of social exclusion and ethno cultural segregation.
In fact, adopting migration as a paradigmatic lens for studying contemporary social, labour and political transformations, rather than an exception, will allow us to identify new practices of mobility and citizenship in a trans- and post-national European context. Finally, as has been indicated earlier, linking research on emigration and immigration, produced from the perspectives of sending and receiving countries respectively, can lead to more complex and integrated approaches to the migration phenomenon.
