Migration Over the Life Course

Edinburgh, Scotland, 12 June 2024

The IUSSP Panel on Lifetime Migration organized a workshop on "Migration Over the Life Course" in Edinburgh on June 12 as a side event of the European Population Conference. This event was framed as part of the dissemination activities of three projects funded by the European Research Council and coordinated by Profs Sergi Vidal (panel co-chair), Clara Mulder, and Helga de Valk.

The workshop was structured into two modules. In the morning, an open peer-review session was conducted, engaging in a lively debate over six papers from early-career researchers. These papers were selected from a pool of 12 proposals, each representing a high standard of research. The authors of these papers were Brian Buh (Vienna Institute of Demography, Austria), Maël Lecoursonnais (Linköping University, Sweden), Justė Lekštytė (European Doctoral School of Demography, France), Özge Elif Özer (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), Margherita Odasso (Center for Demographic Studies, Spain), and Rosa Weber (Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, France, and Stockholm University, Sweden).

From left to right: Aude Bernard, Sergi Vidal, Clara Mulder, and Helga de Valk.

The idea was to simulate a journal’s peer review in person and allow the authors to receive feedback from leading researchers in studying life course migration. These included the three IUSSP panelists listed above and Profs Alícia Adserà, Michael White, and Aude Bernard, also members of the IUSSP Panel on Lifetime Migration. During its almost four hours of duration, this morning session was a fruitful occasion to address a wide range of topics, including the role of school and neighbourhood contexts in shaping residential outcomes, linkages between relocation and transition to parenthood, segregation across multiple domains, healthcare use by migrants, transnational mobilities, and remigration.

Aude Bernard opened the second module in the afternoon, providing the audience with some context about the workshop and the IUSSP panel, its past and upcoming events, including the International Population Conference (IPC) scheduled for July 2025 in Brisbane. The afternoon session was a public event and was well attended, with over 40 attendees. Profs Sergi Vidal, Clara Mulder, and Helga de Valk introduced their respective ERC-projects, LIFELONGMOVE, FamilyTies, and MYMOVE, which informed a subsequent discussion around future avenues of research in the field of life course migration. The workshop closed with a networking session aimed at strengthening the IUSSP network and preparing the ground for future collaborations addressing current literature gaps.
 

Module 1 - "Open review process".

Module 2 - Presentation of ERC-projects LIFELONGMOVE, FamilyTies, and MYMOVE, and discussion about prospects for the field of life course migration.