Qualitative Research in European Migration Studies

Front matter

IMISCOE Research Series

Ricard Zapata=Barrero - Evren Yalaz Editors

3 Qualitative Research in European Migration Studies

Contents

Introduction: Preparing the Way for Qualitative Research

Ricard Zapata-Barrero and Evren Yalaz

Mapping the Qualitative Migration Research in Europe:

Part II Building a Qualitative Research Design

Qualitative Migration Research: Viable Goals, Open-Ended Questions, and Multidimensional Answers Ewa Morawska viii

Categorising What We Study and What We Analyse,

Dirk Jacobs

Where, What and Whom to Study? Principles, Guidelines and Empirical Examples of Case Selection

Karolina Barglowski

Part III Qualitative Techniques and Data Analysis The Interview in Migration Studies: A Step towards

Olena Fedyuk and Violetta Zentai

Focus Groups in Migration Research: A Forum

Annalisa Frisina

Participant Observation in Migration Studies:

Paolo Boccagni and Mieke Schrooten

Teun A. van Dijk Doing Digital Migration Studies: Methodological

Koen Leurs and Madhuri Prabhakar

PartIV Significant Requirements Before Embarking

Methodological and Ethical Dilemmas in Research

Ilse van Liempt and Veronika Bilger

Peter Scholten

Contents

About the Editors and Contributors

Editors

Ricard Zapata-Barrero Full Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). Director of GRITIM-UPF (Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration) and of the Master’s Degree in Migration Studies. His main lines of research deal with contemporary issues of liberal democracy in contexts of diversity, especially the relationship between democracy, citizenship, and immigration. In particular, his research falls within two main fields: Borders/Human Mobility Studies and Diversity/ Citizenship studies. He promotes interdisciplinary knowledge on immigration, combines theory and case studies, policy and socially oriented research, and follows contextual, conceptual, and interpretive approaches. He is a member of the Board of Directors of IMISCOE, the largest research network on immigration in Europe. He co-coordinates two Standing Groups according to its lines of research related to cities and multi-level governance, and diversity and cultural policy. He has recently launched a Research Cluster on Conceptual and Qualitative Research (coord. with E. Yalaz). He is a member of several European projects. His main geographic area of research is the Mediterranean. He is editorial advisory member of several journals and research institutes, and occasional contributor to media and policy debates.

Contact: ricard.zapata@upf.edu

Homepage: http://dcpis.upf.edu/~ricard-zapata/

Evren Yalaz Senior researcher at GRITIM-UPF (Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration at University of Pompeu Fabra). She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University in 2014. Her research interests engage with questions about the politics of racial, ethnic, and immigrantorigin minorities; migrant transnationalism; migrants’ community organizations; and comparative policies of citizenship, migration, and integration. Her dissertation examined sources of variations in degrees and trajectories of immigrant political x About the Editors and Contributors incorporation by focusing on Turkish immigrants and their organizations in Germany and France. She co-coordinates (with R. Zapata-Barrero) IMISCOE Research Cluster on Conceptual and Qualitative Research.

Contact: evren.yalaz @upf.edu

Homepage: https://evrenyalaz.academia.edu/

Contributors

Karolina Barglowski Junior Professor of the Sociology of Migration at the Institute of Sociology at Technical University Dortmund (Germany). Previously, she worked at Bielefeld University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2016, University of Duisburg-Essen, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Her research and teaching focuses on social inequalities, European migration, qualitative methods, and cultural sociology. Her recent publications address issues of intersectionality in transnational spaces, “Coming out within transnational families: intimate confessions under western eyes” in Social Identities (2017) (with Anna Amelina and Basak Bilecen), of European mobility regimes “Migration pressures and opportunities: challenges to belonging within the European Union’s mobility regime” (2016) in InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology, and of transnational methodology “Approaching Transnational Social Protection: Methodological Challenges and Empirical Applications” in Population, Space and Place (2015) (with Basak Bilecen and Anna Amelina).

Contact: karolina.barglowski @tu-dortmund.de

Homepage: _http://www.fk12.tu-dortmund.de/cms/ISO/de/Lehr-und-Forschung sbereiche/Migrationssoziologie/index.html

Veronika Bilger Senior researcher and Head of the Research at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). She has coordinated and worked in numerous comparative research projects in the area of migration and migration policy. She has authored/coauthored studies and publications on issues related to migration statistics, family migration, irregular migration, human trafficking, and methodological and ethical aspects of research involving vulnerable migrants. From 2005 to 2012, she has also lectured International Development at the University of Vienna and has provided numerous trainings on qualitative research methodology and ethics, biographical work, and aspects of vulnerability not only in academia but also to law enforcement, social workers, psychologist, and other professional groups. She is a member of the European IMISCOE Network and editorial board member of the Vienna Journal of African Studies.

Contact: Veronika.Bilger@icmpd.org

Homepage: http://research.icmpd.org

Paolo Boccagni Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Trento and PI of the ERC StG project HOMInG — the Migration-Home Nexus (2016-2021). He

About the Editors and Contributors xi is also a founding member of the IMISCOE research groups IMASP -— International Migration and Social Protection. His main research areas are transnational migration, social welfare, diversity, care, and home-making. On methodological issues, he has published in Qualitative Research (2011), International Journal of Social Research Methodology (2016), and the Handbook of Research Methods in Migration. Recent publication includes Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives (Palgrave, 2017).

Contact: paolo.boccagni @unitn.it

Homepage : https://homing.soc.unitn.it/

Maren Borkert Assistant Professor at the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management Technical University Berlin. She graduated in Romance Languages, Literatures, and Societies at the Universities of Bamberg (DE) and Urbino (IT) in 2001, and obtained her doctorate in Sociology at the Universities of Bamberg and Padua (IT) in 2007. She gained extensive research experiences, both nationally and internationally, at the European forum for migration studies (efms) in Bamberg, the International and European Forum for Migration Research (Fieri) in Turin, the Department of Sociology II at the University of Bamberg (as assistant of German sociologist Richard Miinch), and the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) in Vienna (AT), where she conceptualized, coordinated, and conducted research in the area of migration and integration (governance), European welfare state regimes, knowledge communities, development, human trafficking, transnationalisms, and digital migration studies. From 2010 to 2014, she taught at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna (AT). She led the Austrian case study of the European comparative research project “Science-Society Dialogues on Immigrant Integration in Europe” and acted as national consultant for the study “ICT to support everday life integration of immigrants or ethnic minority people (ConnectIEM).” Since 2015 she works as a Marie Sklodowska Curie Experienced Researcher at the School for Economics and Management at the Technical University Berlin (DE) preparing her habilitation on digital innovation and inclusive entrepreneurship.

Contact: m.borkert @tu-berlin.de Homepage: http://www.entrepreneurship.tu-berlin.de

Olena Fedyuk She obtained her Ph.D. degree from the department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest, in 2011. Her dissertation is an ethnographic examination of transnational moral economies and distant motherhood practices through the cases of Ukrainian female labor migrants to Italy. She held a number of short and mid-term postdoctoral positions, focusing in her works and publications on the overlap of gendered employment and migration policies, transformations in care and labor regimes, the price of irregularity and fragmented legal statuses for transnational migrant households, and transnational political participation of labor migrants in home affairs. Between 2012 and 2014shewasapostdoctoralresearcherinthe Marie CurieITN “ChangingEmployment” at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where she coedited two volumes:

xii About the Editors and Contributors

Ukrainian Migration to the European Union: Lessons from Migration Studies (Springer 2016) and Inclusion and Exclusion in Europe: Migration, Work and Employment Perspectives (ECPR press, 2018). In 2012, Olena picked up documentary film-making as a media of both research and outreach, and a way to grasp humor and contradictions of migration stories. She made two films: Road of a migrants (2015) and Olha’s Italian Diary (2018). Olena’s most recent work turned to looking at migration through the critical sociology of labor perspective: she produced reports and continues to publish results from the explorations of the conditions of non-EU temporary agency and posted workers in Hungary, as well as the role of temporary work agencies and recruitment agencies in fragmenting a workplace.

Contact: olenafedyuk @ gmail.com

Annalisa Frisina Associate Professor at the University of Padova (Italy). Ph.D. in Sociology. She wrote three publications on focus groups in ethnic and migration studies (Back-talk Focus Groups as a Follow-Up Tool in Qualitative Migration Research: The Missing Link?, in FQS 2006; Il focus group. Una guida pratica, Il Mulino, 2010; Negoziare |’Alterita. Focus group e processi di significazione delle immagini, in Rassegna di Sociologia, 2014). She teaches Qualitative and Visual Research for undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students at the University of Padova.

Contact: annalisa.frisina@unipd.it

Homepage: http://persone.csia.unipd.it/persone/curriculum/E7BDF5B285A 13497371CAB781C52A 19F.pdf

Theodoros Iosifides Professor of Social Science Methods at the Department of Geography of the University of the Aegean, Greece. He studied Sociology and Regional Development in Panteion University of Athens, Greece, and holds a D.Phil. in Geography from the University of Sussex, UK (1997). For the last 19 years, he teaches social science methods, human/social geography, and migration in the University of the Aegean, Greece, and at the Hellenic Open University. He has written extensively books, journal papers, and book chapters on qualitative methods, social science epistemology, migration, and human/social geography and participated in several international research projects.

Contact: thiwsi@aegean.gr

Homepage: _https://geography.aegean.gr/ppl/index_en.php?content=0&bio=thi wsi

Dirk Jacobs Director of the Group for research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality (GERME) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), and Full Professor in Sociology at the ULB. Ph.D. in Social Sciences (Utrecht University, 1998). He is a recognized specialist in the areas of ethnic minorities, social capital, disfavored neighborhoods, racism, and xenophobia. Jacobs teaches methodology courses on both quantitative and qualitative methods. He has been in charge of numerous research projects at a regional, national, and international level and has

About the Editors and Contributors xiii benefited from prestigious funding sources such as the European Research Council (ERC). His recent work focuses foremost on the risk of reproduction of social inequality within the educational system.

Contact: dirk.jacobs @ulb.ac.be

Homepage: http://www.dirkjacobs.be

Russell King Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor in Migration Studies at Malmö University. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of Malta, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, University of Trieste, and Cornell University. He is the founding director of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research and a founder-member of IMISCOE, coordinating its research cluster on “Gender, Age and Generations.” He has been researching and teaching on migration for 40 years and has written extensively on many types of migration and in many geographical contexts within and beyond Europe. Among his main themes of research interests have been return migration, retirement and lifestyle migration, student migration, migration and development, and the links between internal and international migration. The countries where he has conducted project-funded research include the UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Albania, and Latvia. He is committed to the value of interdisciplinary, multi-sited, and mixed-methods research in migration studies and has delivered several doctoral and master’s level training workshops on research methods. Contact: R.King @sussex.ac.uk

Koen Leurs Assistant Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University. He is a feminist Internet researcher and he has published extensively on migration, diaspora, gender, and youth culture. Leurs has published Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0 (Amsterdam University Press, 2015). He is coeditor of the SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration (forthcoming 2019) and journal special issues on “Forced Migration and Digital Connectivity in(to) Europe” for Social Media + Society (January-April 2018) and “Connected Migrants” for Popular Communication (2018, 16.1). Currently, Leurs is Principal Investigator of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research funded research project “Young Connected Migrants. Comparing Digital Practices of Young Asylum Seekers and Expatriates in the Netherlands” and the Dutch National Research Agenda funded project “Media Literacy through Making Media: A Key to Participation for Migrant and Refugee Youth?.”

Contact: k-h.a.leurs@uu.nl

Homepage: www.koenleurs.net

Ewa Morawska Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. Her fields of specialization are social theory, comparative-historical sociology of international migration and inter-group relations, and qualitative research methods. She is the author of numerous books and journal articles, including A Sociology of Immigration: (Re)Making Multifaceted America (2009); International Migration Research:

xiv About the Editors and Contributors

Constructions, Omissions, and Promises of Interdisciplinarity (coedited with M. Bommes, 2005); “Composite Meanings, Flexible Ranges, and Multi-level Conditions of Conviviality,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2014; “Toward a Reconciliation of the Structuration and Morphogenesis Theories of Social Processes “Tested’ in the Eventful Historical Analysis,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 2013; “Multiculturalism from below: Reflections of an Immigrant Ethnographer,” in Debating Multiculturalism, eds P. Kivisto and O. Wahlbeck, 2013; “Ethnicity as a Primordial-Situational-Constructed Experience: Different Times, Different Places, Different Constellations,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 2011. She is currently working on a project comparing ground-level multiculturalism or everyday inter-group relations in three cities in the past: Renaissance Venice, Enlightenmentera St. Petersburg, and Wilhelmine Berlin.

Contact: emorawsk @essex.ac.uk

Madhuri Prabhakar Research master’s student in Gender Studies at Utrecht University. She holds an Undergraduate Honors Degree in History. In the past academic year, she participated as an Emancipation Ambassador in the pilot project called “Emancipation Ambassador Training” program held by EP-Nuffic. She also served as a student reviewer for the inaugural edition of Junctions: Graduate Journal of the Humanities, Utrecht University. She has worked with “ATGENDER,” a Europe-based association for academics, practitioners, activists, and institutions in the field of women’s and gender studies, feminist research, women’s rights, gender equality, and diversity. She worked as a research assistant for the ongoing research on “Young Connected Migrants” undertaken by Dr. Koen Leurs. Her current research work addresses the experiences of Indian migrants in the Netherlands, focusing on their social, cultural, and digital negotiations in the process of “integration,” both internally, i.e., among themselves, and externally, i.e., as a group, at the place of destination.

Contact: m.prabhakar @uu.nl

Peter Scholten Professor of Migration and Diversity Policies at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Director of IMISCOE. His research focuses on themes of intercultural governance, multilevel governance, comparative public policy, and the relationship between knowledge and power. Peter is also editor-in-chief of the journal Comparative Migration Studies, member of the editorial board of the Journal of Comparative Public Policy, and coordinator of the joint master program on the Governance of Migration and Diversity of Erasmus University, Delft University, and Leiden University.

Contact: p.scholten @ fsw.eur.nl

Homepage: www.peterscholten.eu

Mieke Schrooten Lecturer in Social Work at Odisee University College (Brussels). Her research interests include mobility, social media, transmigration, and urban social work. Mieke completed her Ph.D. at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre at the University of Leuven in 2016. Her Ph.D. research

About the Editors and Contributors XV focused on migration trajectories, social networks, and (trans)local practices of Brazilians in Belgium. She is coauthor of Transmigration. Social Work in Times of Superdiversity (Acco, 2016) and has published in journals such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and The Australian Journal of Anthropology.

Contact: mieke.schrooten @ odisee.be

Teun A. van Dijk He was Professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Amsterdam until 2004, and since 1999 Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Associate researcher at GRITIM-UPF. After earlier work on generative poetics, text grammar, and the psychology of text processing, his work since 1980 takes a more critical perspective and deals with discursive racism, news in the press, ideology, knowledge, and context. He is the author of several books in most of these areas, and he edited The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (4 vols, 1985), the introductory book Discourse Studies (2nd edition, 2011), as well as the reader The Study of Discourse (5 vols., 2007). He founded 6 international journals, Poetics, Text (now Text & Talk), Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies, Discourse & Communication, and the Internet journal in Spanish Discurso & Sociedad (www.dissoc.org), of which he still edits the latter four. He holds three honorary doctorates and has lectured widely in many countries, especially also in Latin America. With Adriana Bolivar he founded the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso (ALED) in 1995. Founding Director of the Centre of Discourse Studies in Barcelona (www.discoursestudies.org).

Contact: vandijk @ discourse.org

Homepage: www.discourses.org

Ilse van Liempt Assistant Professor in Urban Geography and Qualitative Research Methods in the Human Geography Department at Utrecht University. She has published widely in the fields of migration, urban studies, and research methods. Previously, she worked as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR), Sussex University, where she conducted research on Somali immigrants who had moved from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom. She completed her Ph.D. at the Institute for Ethnic and Migration Studies (IMES) at the University of Amsterdam in 2007. This Ph.D. research on human smuggling was published with Amsterdam University Press (Navigating Borders: Inside Perspectives into the Process of Human Smuggling into the Netherlands).

Contact: I.C.vanLiempt@uu.nl

Homepage: https://www.uu.nl/staff/ICvanLiempt/0

Violetta Zentai Cultural anthropologist and Co-director of the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University (CEU) since 2003. She is engaged in research focusing on ethnic and gender inequalities, welfare debates, and postsocialist economic transformation. She served as CEU team leader or consortium coordinator of a number of recent larger comparative European research projects. She also contributed to Marie Curie doctoral training networks in topics of critical xvi About the Editors and Contributors labor studies and migrant inclusion. She is faculty member of CEU’s Sociology and Social Anthropology Department as well as the School of Public Policy. Parallel to her academic engagement, she worked as expert with the Open Society Foundations for two decades in initiatives related to democratic local governance, equality mainstreaming, and rights-based development. Her most recent publications discuss Romani women’s movement and European Roma politics in edited volumes published by Edward Elgar and Routledge Publishers.

Contact: Zentaiv @ceu.edu

Homepage: https://people.ceu.edu/violetta_zentai

Chapter 1 A) Introduction: Preparing the Way chee for Qualitative Research in Migration Studies

Ricard Zapata-Barrero and Evren Yalaz

“An attitude of moral indifference has no connection with scientific ‘objectivity”

Max Weber

The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, [1905] 1949, 60)

Migration is not only transforming sending, transit, and receiving countries, but also social scientific studies. The expansions of human mobility, profound demographic transformations, and their diverse social, political and economic consequences have brought unprecedented theoretical and empirical attention to the phenomenon. While migration research has relatively longer and more established tradition in US academia, its growth in European scholarship in the last three decades has been remarkable. An increasing number of scholars and journals devote their work to understanding causes and consequences, current situations, changes and continuities of migration-related issues in Europe. Moreover, the expansion of research centres and networks, undergraduate and graduate programs, conference meetings, winter and summer schools demonstrate increasing institutional visibility of migration research. For instance, IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration, and Social Cohesion), which is currently Europe’s largest network of scholars in the area of migration and integration, has grown from 19 founding member institutes in 2004 (Brus 2014) to 39 member institutes in 2017 and over 500 individual members. On the other hand, what is less evident is the systematic attention to the methodological issues in European migration studies!. This edited volume presents an

'There have been ample textbooks that primarily focus on qualitative research in social sciences, such as classic works of Strauss and Corbin (1990) and Denzin and Lincoln (1994) and as well as more recent qualitative research handbooks of Beuving and de Vries (2015) and Yin (2010). While

R. Zapata-Barrero (%4) - E. Yalaz

Political and Social Sciences Department, University of Pompeu Fabra — GRITIM-UPF, Barcelona-Catalonia, Spain

e-mail: ricard.zapata@upf.edu; evren.yalaz @upf.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 1 R. Zapata-Barrero, E. Yalaz (eds.), Qualitative Research in European Migration

2 R. Zapata-Barrero and E. Yalaz effort to address this gap, through the collaboration of migration scholars from diverse disciplines. It is a unique volume as it brings together a multidisciplinary perspective as well as illustrations of different issues derived from the research experience of the recognized authors.

The publication is particularly addressed to graduate and post-graduate students and, more generally, to those who embark on the task of doing qualitative research for the first time in the field of immigration. It is also addressed to more senior researchers who are interested in strengthening their competence in the use of qualitative methods, specifically applied to the study of migration processes. In a nutshell, each chapter provides the readers with a set of substantial reflections that we hope will guide them in dealing with the particular aspects of qualitative research when applied to migration studies. While covering different stages and topics of migration research, each author explores when and why a particular dimension of qualitative research becomes key to migration questions; how it adopts different logics, designs, and techniques; what kind of theoretical, epistemological, empirical, and ethical challenges researchers in this field face; and how these challenges can be addressed, and possibly lessened or at least controlled.

This edited volume is primarily concerned with the issues of qualitative methodology and its diverse research techniques in migration studies. The central focus neither assumes a hierarchy among different methodological traditions nor carries any intention of unilaterally imposing norms of one methodological tradition over others. In other words, qualitative methodology neither can be seen as inherently superior to other methodological traditions nor as a “last resort” technique when statistical methods are not appropriate (Mahoney 2007, p. 122). What current research shows is that scientific excellence and academic development go hand in hand with the use of diverse methodological tools, approaches, and designs. In this respect, we acknowledge the complementarity of different methodological paradigms that vary in terms of their strengths and limitations, and appreciate the efforts of multi-method collaborations.

Yet, we also believe that qualitative research has a particular importance for migration studies, considering its potential for producing rich, in-depth, and nuanced analysis; allowing for conceptual refinements with higher validity; redefining the existing categories and generating new hypotheses and even theoretical paradigms; exploring complex, conjunctural, multi-faceted dimensions of the migration dynamics; and last but not least, being better tuned for understanding the voices of social actors and immigrant groups, especially the ones who lack means of participation this extensive literature on qualitative research highly contributes to social scientific inquiry in general, it lacks an emphasis on migration studies and its special theoretical and methodological needs. On the other hand, few existing works on the area of research methods in migration studies (losifides 2011; Vargas-Silva 2012; Voloder and Kirtipchenko 2013; Elliot et al. 2017) either overlook unique issues of qualitative methodology in migration studies or did not address the need for developing special methodological awareness for the European context.

1 Introduction: Preparing the Way for Qualitative Research in Migration Studies 3 and representation in mainstream society and politics. Together with these distinct characteristics, most contributors in this volume also show another feature of qualitative research: there is always a certain degree of critical assessment of the reality being under qualitative scrutiny. We believe that these distinctive features of qualitative inquiry are crucial components of migration research.

Most of the migration-related topics, such as border/mobility, diversity/citizenship, integration, incorporation/participation, and discrimination/xenophobia require deep contextual analysis, which could not be folded into already existing analytical frameworks. This complexity is already present in many migration debates related to multi-level analysis, super-diversity, post-migration era, transnational studies, new forms of mobility in Europe, issues of refugees and so on. The authors in this volume, depending on their area of expertise, discuss the key aspects of qualitative research while drawing on their own theoretical, epistemological and empirical inquiries. Therefore, along with methodological guidance, each chapter provides rich empirical examples from diverse topics of migration studies.

Qualitative research is far from being a unified perspective. It is “a generic approach in social research” (Beuving and de Vries 2015, p. 19), covering a wide range of research designs (from single case studies to comparative designs), epistemological approaches (from critical realism to interpretivism) and research techniques (from in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation, to analysis of documents and visual data). In most of the cases, the disciplinary diversity of social research is largely translated into different qualitative tools covering political science’s expert interviews and document analysis, sociology’s organisational fieldwork, interpretive and interactionist research, anthropology’s ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, history’s archival research and oral history, and linguistics’ discourse analysis. This plurality makes it even more crucial to raise methodological awareness and interdisciplinary dialogue that would acknowledge specific theoretical, epistemological and empirical challenges that migration scholars encounter, and develop innovations to address particular research needs.

While migration studies carry a wide range of focuses, from migrants to host society and its actors, from migration-related policies to public institutions, this edited volume is primarily concerned with qualitative empirical research on migrants, migrant communities, and their interactions with the host society, public and private actors, and stakeholders. In this respect, some important areas of migration research, such as qualitative approaches to studying migration policy making or ethnographic methods to studying administrative institutions dealing with migrants are only tangentially addressed. In return, this migrant-centred and bottom-up approach enables the volume’s contributors to unpack the category of migrants, explore its internal diversity, and problematize existing categories and boundary-making mechanisms. Rather than taking the category of migrants for granted, this volume complexifies it through distinguishing migrants, not only in terms of their country of origin, race, ethnicity, religion, and gender, but also in terms of their patterns of mobility (temporary/permanent stayers, circular migrants, etc.), condition of exit (economic migration, family unification, and forced migration), legal status (naturalized in host country, foreigners, documented/undocumented migrants),

4 R. Zapata-Barrero and E. Yalaz position in labor market (high skilled, low-skilled), age at migration, and length of stay. In this respect, we acknowledge that migrants highly vary from each other in terms of available political, economic, and social opportunities in their destinations, incurred public reactions, perceptions of inclusion, discrimination, and marginality, and networks and resources to respond back to possible precarious conditions. This volume undertakes the task of exploring methodological underpinnings of qualitative study on such a diverse population and their interaction with the host society, directly or through public and private mediators.

One additional value of this book is its geographic focus on Europe. In this way, it seeks to explore theoretical and methodological issues that are raised by distinctive features of the European context. The border and definition of Europe is a highly controversial matter. As Martiniello and Rath (2014, pp. 11-12) point out, there is no consensus about Europe’s geographical extent. While some would restrict Europe to six founding states of the European Community, others would define it as current member states of the European Union. While some would consider the continental peninsula as Europe, including both EU and non-EU countries, others would extent it even further, including Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey. In any way, what becomes evident is that European migration policies become a driver for building a European political community. This also invites a reflection on how to shape the normative contours of the external borders of Europe (Zapata-Barrero 2009). Efforts to define a European identity is a contentious issue (Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2015). For some, Europe constitutes an exemplary union based on common ideals, values, interests, historical legacies and traditions. For others, European identity is quite ambivalent, reflected on its plurality, inconsistency, and contradictions. Europe is seen in a crossfire between diverse national (and even sometimes ultra-nationalistic) claims and uniformity posed by globalisation; between promoters of acommon European identity and fluctuation and hybridization of identities; and between supporters of “Fortress Europe” and unprecedented human mobility and emerging transnational ties.

Despite all these viewpoints, in order to facilitate theoretical and empirical research, we continue to argue in favour of the analytical benefits of using Europe as a category of analysis. Historically, US-based scholarship has had a pioneer role in shaping the methodological debates in the field. These debates have often reflected the unique immigration experience of North America. The absence of diverse national political frameworks in the US context has prioritized efforts for devising methodological techniques for researching various immigrant groups in a singlecountry context. Across-place analysis has been limited to comparing different US states. The unique nature of immigration flows, the presence of a host society with a migration background, the lack of interventionist welfare state and laissez-faire nature of immigrant integration, the particular history of race-relations and the legacy of slavery, the extensive jus soli citizenship regime and many other factors has had deep impact on the questions and designs of qualitative research in migration studies in the US. On the other hand, we argue that Europe, despite its ambivalent nature, has a distinct place in international migration studies. Some of these distinctive features include its unique history of state and nation-making, its colonial past

1 Introduction: Preparing the Way for Qualitative Research in Migration Studies 5 and its lingering effects, its welfare systems, its varied citizenship regimes and integration policies, its transnational structure, its religious history, and its geographic proximity to hot spots of human mobility, such as the Mediterranean area. This latter being one of the epicentres of how tragic human mobility could be without moral face. We believe that these distinctive features of the European context profoundly shape the key questions, concepts, and research designs of qualitative inquiry, therefore, they can be best addressed through a context-sensitive methodological awareness.

Migration studies often require interdisciplinary knowledge, considering its inevitable link with a wide range of research areas such as citizenship studies, diversity studies, mobility studies, gender studies, cultural studies, religion studies, and urban studies. To address this issue, this book brings together migration scholars coming from different social sciences disciplines, working on diverse areas of migration research, and focusing on different regions and migrant groups of Europe. While each contributor focuses on diverse topics and different stages of research, they all share the common concern of considering the role of qualitative research in European migration studies. They do so by highlighting its key strengths, points of limitations, and ways to address these pitfalls through innovative techniques; by opening the category of qualitative methodology up and presenting its diverse logics and applications across different areas of migration studies and across different disciplines; and by contributing to building a context-based methodological approach that would address to the particular aspects of the European context.