Collaboration between scholars, artists, politicians, migrants and citizens creates new future imaginaries of migration.
PEOPLE
Ana Beduschi
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currently makes me feel both hopeful and uncertain, because, in terms of human mobility and migration, it reflects a world of expanding possibilities alongside complex challenges.
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Ana Beduschi is a Full Professor of Law at the University of Exeter, Law School. Her work examines the interaction between law and digital technologies, with a focus on artificial intelligence, data protection, international human rights law, and privacy. Her recent publications address regulatory approaches to digital technologies, synthetic data, extended reality, digital identity, and the implications of artificial intelligence for migration management and humanitarian action.
Professor Beduschi holds a PhD in Law (2011) from the University of Montpellier 1, where she also completed an LLB (2003), an LLM in International and European Law (2004), and an LLM in European Human Rights Law (2005). She earned an additional LLB in Law from University of São Paulo State (UNESP) in Brazil (2000) and was admitted to the São Paulo Bar in 2001.
Cana Bilir-Meier
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makes me feel apprehensive because in terms of human mobility and migration, it means borders are becoming less porous, and even those who manage to cross them face draconian restrictions on their freedoms. Migrants are pressured to integrate, yet told that they can never be integrated. They face the hostility of increasingly right-wing hosts.
In my own experience, migration means many things, both negative and positive. It is a privilege to experience the solidarity of the minority and to have a concrete identity, to know where you stand and at the same time experience multiple perspectives through the eyes of migration and having many places to belong. But it also means to be rootless and alienated, to face discrimination, to be judged in your community as a monolith.
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Cana Bilir-Meier is a filmmaker and artist based in Munich (Germany). Her work engages with memory, migration, and cultural education through film, drawing, sound, and performance. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Sabancı University in Istanbul. In 2018, she co-initiated the memorial project for Semra Ertan and in 2020 co-edited the poetry collection Semra Ertan: Mein Name ist Ausländer / Benim Adım Yabancı. In 2021, she was a visiting professor for art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Lara El Mekaui
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The future of migration feels unsettled yet motivating to me because it means that people continue to negotiate their belonging and mobility, and that hopefully governments will develop better policies around immigration and settlement that do not tolerate and abuse but embrace and incorporate migrants. The biggest challenge right now is that ongoing wars that devastate homelands continue to displace people, leading to chaotic waves of migration.
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Lara El Mekaui is a Research Fellow at the Global Migration Institute. She researches future methods and migration, and is interested in identity, migration, and belonging as well as uncertainty. She specializes in qualitative and arts-based methods and critical digital pedagogy, having designed and taught courses on digital lives.
Marcus Engler
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Thinking about the future of migration currently makes me excited because it means to step back from the often narrow-minded, toxic and short-term debates of the present and to focus on the long-term challenges and opportunities that are connected with international migration.
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Marcus Engler is a researcher at the DeZIM Institute, which he joined in 2020. His work focuses on forced displacement and migration dynamics, as well as German, European, and global refugee and migration policies.
He studied social sciences and economics at Humboldt University of Berlin and at Sciences Po Paris and received his PhD in sociology from Humboldt University in cooperation with the French-German Centre Marc Bloch.
Prior to joining DeZIM, Marcus held various positions in migration research and policy advisory. He has worked with the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration (SVR), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück. He has published widely, both in academic journals and in the policy area. Dr. Engler regularly comments on migration policy debates for national and international media and is actively involved in advising political stakeholders.
Naika Foroutan
RESEARCH
Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Political Science, Sociology, Social Studies
h-drk
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currently makes me feel concerned, yet analytically attentive. Empirical data suggest that migration will increase due to conflict, inequality, and climate change. The central challenges lie in unsafe mobility pathways—where people continue to die while attempting to migrate—and in persistent exclusionary attitudes and unequal participation structures in destination societies. At the same time, survey data indicate gradual normative shifts toward greater acceptance in postmigrant contexts. In aging societies of the Global North, we observe emerging competition for migrants. I am concerned that this will reinforce a utilitarian logic, positioning immigrants primarily as labor, with the risk of institutionalizing second-class membership.
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Naika Foroutan is Professor of Social Sciences at the Humboldt-University in Berlin where she heads the Department of Integration Studies and Social Policies at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration (BIM). Foroutan is Director of the German Center for Integration and Migration (DeZIM) a government-funded research institute that provides empirical analysis on migration and integration and monitors ‘Racist Realities’ for the German government.
Foroutans research focuses on countries of immigration, their changing national identities and shifting attitudes towards minorities as well as the impact of pluralization on norms and values. In her book The Post-migrant society: A promise of plural democracy she developed a much-acclaimed theoretical framework for analyzing social transformations in migration-impacted societies.
For her scholarly work, she was awarded the Caroline von Humboldt Professorship in 2025. In the same year, she received an Honorary Doctorate from Lund University. Previous awards include the Fritz Behrens Foundation Science Prize for Excellent Research (2012) and the Höffmann Science Prize of the University of Vechta (2016).
Hakib Abdul Karim
RESEARCH
University of Ghana
Theatre for Development, Applied Theatre
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Thinking about the future currently makes me feel cautiously unsettled because, in terms of human mobility, it means rising forced migration driven by climate change, conflict, and inequality. Challenges: stricter borders, xenophobia, precarity. Hope: resilient migrant networks, cultural exchange and more inclusive policy.
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Abdul Karim Hakib is an applied theatre/TfD scholar-practitioner who bridges academic research with community-based performance. He is a lecturer in the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Ghana and Executive Director of the Global Arts and Development Centre (GADEC). His research interest straddles applied theatre, sustainable development goals, migration and development, creative arts and culture, community and organizational development. He has co-edited major volumes such as Theatre for Development in Africa (2023) and Applied Theatre and the SDGs (2024), and contributed chapters on topics like Efua Sutherland’s cultural networks. In parallel, he is a prolific director and adapter of stage works; I Told You So, Mansa Musa and rail of the Lost Golds, Wogbejeke, Vagina Monologues and The Slaves Revisited. Hakib plays leadership roles in Ghana’s cultural networks (ITI Ghana, Arterial Network Ghana) and is a Creative Community Fellow (USA).
Bernadette Klausberger
CIVIL SOCIETY ART
Migration Matters
Film/Media Producer, Curator
h-drk
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… challenges me in a positive way and makes me think more of untapped potential than of impending disasters: How could things be different in 2050? - not (just) as a collection of fantasy ideas that spark fascination and wonder, but as plans and concrete proposals for how we can shape the future, starting right here and now. It's the active, creative aspect of it that motivates me!
Human mobility will continue to increase due to global interconnectedness and technological innovations; how we enable and manage migration will significantly influence how well humankind as a collective develops and how justice, solidarity, and identity are understood and practiced.
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Bernadette Klausberger is a film and media producer, festival manager and member of the NGO Migration Matters. She studied European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam and Film Production at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. As a producer she has developed a wide range of innovative audio-visual projects, including the award-winning German-Lebanese co-production Manivelle – Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow.
Over the past ten years, she has developed and co-created online courses, documentaries, open educational resources, and event series, including ‘The Future of Storytelling’ (https://www.youtube.com/@officialStoryMOOC), which is considered one of the most successful MOOCs ever. For the NGO Migration Matters (www.migrationmatters.me) and together with international migration scholars, she has designed an extensive series of educational videos on migration-related topics and concepts such as nationalism, populism, and multiculturalism.
Bernadette's work as a curator focuses particularly on projects at the intersection of art, research and societal change.
Theodora Lam
RESEARCH
University of Singapore
Geography / Social Science
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Thinking about the future of migration currently makes me apprehensive because of the heightened possibility of an entrenched global system of permanent temporariness alongside increased forced displacement due to various factors including technological and climate change.
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Theodora Lam is Senior Research Fellow in Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research interests cover transnational migration and families, the web of care within transnational households, geographies of children and young people, and gender studies. She has researched on both skilled and low-waged labour migrants as well as their families in Singapore and other Asian countries. Theodora has published on various themes relating to migration, citizenship and education, and co-edited several special journal issues and books. She has recently published in Population, Space and Place,Mobilities and Asia Pacific Viewpoint.
Nicolas Malevé
ART RESEARCH
Medialab and School of Law, Sciences Po, Paris
Art, Aesthetics, Computational Culture, Media
h-drk
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currently makes me feel anxious yet energized because, in terms of human mobility and migration, it means clearly the current alliance of capitalism and the war machine turns the disrespect of human life into a rule. And makes the issue of migration even more worrying. Yet, the very extreme character of the current conditions might provide the ground for more essential responses.
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Visual artist, data activist and computer science geek, Nicolas is interested in the socio-technical networks of artificial intelligence and their cultural implications. He is currently a postdoc researcher at Sciences Po’s School of Law and Medialab (Paris). He also explores the potential of collaborative cartography to document subjective and collective experiences. Nicolas completed a Phd thesis on the algorithms of vision at the London South Bank University. He is a member of the Institute for Computational Vandalism with Michael Murtaugh and Ellef Pretsaeter where he is experimenting with techniques to engage with large collections of visual materials and explore different ways to navigate and question them.
Alice Massari
RESEARCH
Toronto Metropolitan University,
Global Migration Institute
Political Science, International Relations
in-drk
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It currently makes me feel optimistic because, in terms of human mobility and migration, it is hard to imagine a worse global context. I hope that the debt resulting from this crisis will lead to a revolutionary change of direction.
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Alice Massari is a humanitarian and migration specialist whose work connects scholarship with two decades of field and advisory experience across crisis-affected settings in Africa and the Middle East. She holds a PhD in Political Science and International Relations and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Copenhagen, leading a multi-year research project.
Her research examines how images shape migration governance and humanitarian action. She is the author of the open-access monograph Visual Securitization: Humanitarian Representations and Migration Governance.
Alongside academia, Alice has served since 2020 as Humanitarian Adviser with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, delivering context analysis and strategic foresight for senior decision-makers, including extensive work on the Sudan crisis, donor coordination and joint advocacy. She is also an EU expert on migration and humanitarian action, supporting European Commission bodies with evaluation and policy analysis, including migration analysis work at the Joint Research Centre.
Pınar Öğrenci
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As an artist working on forced migration, I have come to understand—through personal experience—that no one can ever be completely certain of their home or sense of safety, and that waves of migration may one day affect everyone, even those considered the most secure. While I was working on migrants moving from Syria to Turkey and onward to Europe in 2015–16, I had no idea that just two years later I would be forced to leave Turkey myself.
In the new world order of today, thinking about the future fills me with anxiety. I believe that very soon we may all become displaced, forced to move from one place to another. Mobility, migration, homelessness, and estrangement will no longer be concerns only of the Global South, but will also shape the realities of those in the North.
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Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (b. 1973, Van, Turkey) lives in Berlin. Displacement, migration, survival, and resistance are central to her films and installations. With a background in architecture and restoration, her poetic, research-based video works and installations draw on traces of material culture related to forced displacement. Öğrenci engages with place, site, and architecture as materializations of violence. Her practice responds to collective histories often left unspoken, inviting audiences to imagine futures grounded in justice, equality, and collective healing. Her work has been widely exhibited at major biennials and institutions, including HKW (2025), the Venice Biennale (2024), the Harvard Art Museums (2024), documenta fifteen (2022), the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018), the 6th Athens Biennale (2018), and the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017). She has held solo exhibitions at the Harvard Museum Boston (2026), Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG, 2025), Frac Bretagne (2024), the Berlinische Galerie (2023), the Kunst Haus Wien – Museum Hundertwasser (2017), and Depo Istanbul (2017).
Julie Reindl
CIVIL SOCIETY RESEARCH
Migration Matters
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Thinking about the future of migration currently makes me both concerned and curious, because it means the greatest challenge lies not in migration itself, but in loosening the inherited stories we tell about borders and belonging, so we can reimagine how we move and live together on a changing planet.
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Julia Reindl is a futures and transitions researcher specializing in public engagement with emerging environmental, technological, and societal issues. Her work focuses on how diverse publics imagine and negotiate complex futures, and how public future-making processes can be meaningfully integrated into decision-making.
Julia holds a Master’s degree in Futures Studies from Freie Universität Berlin with a background in participatory design and anthropology. She applies her experience in futures methods to cultivate alternative ways of understanding and experiencing topics such as human mobility, working with civil society to bridge the gap between foresight and community action. She currently works with Migration Matters, consulting on the selection and application of futures methodologies for the FutureMig Berlin work.
Mary Setrana
RESEARCH
University of Ghana,
Centre for Migration Studies
Sociology
h-drk
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I'm hopeful about the future of migration, but with caution. Across Africa, the Global South, and beyond, there is a real opportunity to shape migration through inclusive policies and to shift negative narratives toward more balanced, human-centered perspectives. Realising this will require targeted policy interventions and sustained institutional commitment.
We must also draw on co-created, research-informed evidence, along with stronger collaboration and innovation, to ensure that mobility becomes a driver of sustainable development. In the same vein, efforts must be directed at reducing vulnerability and safeguarding the rights and dignity of all migrants. That way, we are better positioned to build migration systems that are just, inclusive and responsive to the realities of our time.
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Prof. Mary Boatemaa Setrana is an Associate Professor of Migration and Social Change and Director of the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Ghana. She is the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Research Chair on Forced Displacement in Anglophone West Africa and serves on the Scientific Committee of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.
She has led major EU, UKRI, AU and UN-supported projects, contributed to national migration policies in Ghana and Botswana, and supported African Union frameworks. Her research focuses on migration governance, forced displacement, gender and climate-related mobilities.
Sarah Smith
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Thinking about the future currently makes me feel concerned because, in terms of human mobility and migration, we are facing increasing polarization, charged debates, and discriminatory narratives about human mobility.
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Dr. Sarah E.K. Smith is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Art, Culture and Global Relations in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University. Her research focuses on cultural diplomacy, examining how visual art and cultural institutions contribute to shaping global relations. Sarah is a co‐founder of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative and contributes to the International Cultural Relations Research Alliance, the Idaho Museum of International Diaspora’s Academics and Research Team, and the Centre for Sustainable Curating.
Anna Triandafyllidou
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currently makes me feel hopeful but also concerned because, in terms of human mobility and migration, it means that the world is growing increasingly unbalanced and unequal. Some world regions like Africa or Asia have more young people and some other world regions have more capital and more technology. This imbalance and inequality is increasing rather than decreasing. At the same time, technologies are changing the way we move, the way we work, the way migration is processed (governance), the way in which migrants make their plans and even their desires and needs (through relative deprivation). In short, my concern is that we are heading towards a more polarising world. But I am someone optimistic so I feel that humans will find solutions to these tensions and we will all end up in a better place.
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Anna Triandafyllidou holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University and is the Founding Director of TMU’s newly launched Global Migration Institute. She is also the Scientific Director of a $98.4 mln multi-University and multi-partner Program entitled Bridging Divides funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. Prior to joining TMU in 2019, she held a Robert Schuman Chair at the European University Institute, in Florence, Italy. Anna chairs the Metropolis International Migration Network and is Editor of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. In 2021, the University of Liège awarded Triandafyllidou a doctorate honoris causa in recognition of her contribution to migration scholarship.
Anna has published widely in the field of migration governance, migration and national identity, and migrant integration in comparative perspectives. She was part of the OECD Network of International Migration Experts from 2010 to 2018 and has provided expert opinions for the Senate of Canada, Immigration Refuges and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the European Parliament and the European Commission.
Mary Kissiwah Yeboah
RESEARCH
University of Ghana,
Centre for Migration Studies
Sociology
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Thinking about the future makes me feel quietly hopeful because movement today is both burden and possibility. There are deep challenges such as tightening borders, unequal access to mobility, and the invisible weight carried by transnational families (especially children growing up between worlds, and who often learn to answer the question “Where are you from?” in more than one way). Yet, there is also hope in how people remain connected across distance, in the resilience of migrants, and in the slow shift toward more humane, dignity-centered conversations on mobility.
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I am a PhD fellow with a background in sustainable development, working on questions of migration, identity, and transnational family life. I see migration not just as movement, but as something lived and felt in everyday life, all the while shaping how people understand themselves, home, and their future.
Brenda Yeoh
RESEARCH
University of Singapore,
Asia Research Institute
Geography, Social Science
h-drk
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of migration currently makes me more concerned than hopeful because the gap between the mobile and the immobile is rapidly widening, and migration pathways and opportunity structures increasingly bifurcated to serve the privileged rather than the impoverished.
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Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA is Distinguished Professor, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Migration and Mobilities Cluster, Asia Research Institute, NUS. She was awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize for outstanding achievements in Geography in 2021 for her contributions to migration and transnationalism studies.
Her research interests in Asian migrations span themes including social reproduction and care migration; skilled migration and cosmopolitanism; and marriage migrants and cultural politics. She has published widely on these topics and her recent books include Handbook of Gender and Mobilities (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024 with V. Preston, S. McLafferty and M. Maciejewska); The Question of Skill in Cross Border Mobilities (Routledge, 2023 with G. Liu-Farrer and M. Baas); Handbook of Migration and the Family (Edward Elgar, 2023 with J. Waters); and Handbook of Transnationalism (Edward Elgar, 2022 with F.L. Collins).