2025 IMISCOE PhD School: Developing a sensory methodology in migration studies
For the 2025 edition of the IMISCOE PhD school, we aim at training PhD candidates and early career researchers affiliated at institutions around the world to develop visual and sensory methodologies in migration research. We use the term “methodology” as we believe that visual and sensory projects ought to be embedded in a broader research project. Concretely, that means that participants will be encouraged to critically assess the theoretical, empirical, and ethical implications of their methodological choices.
In the training programme, we will focus on the use of four visual media to research the multisensory experiences of migration scholars and of the ones who have experienced migration, but also migration processes and policies. Those media are photography, film, cartography, and collaborative methods. In that sense, we propose establishing conceptual links between the intellectual and the sensorial, by designing research methodologies that do not omit the data coming from the multisensory experiences of doing visual research. The training also provides hands-on activities and good practices helping to rethink our research questions; get acquainted with the literature; combine visual methodologies with other modes of data collection - qualitative interviews, discussion groups, walk-alongs, observations, etc; expand our analytical toolbox; and potentially create visual and sensory outputs for dissemination.