From bridging research and practice to connecting local and central governance, Melissa Weihmayer, who recently joined the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity (GEM), reflects on how her research experience and goals could shape future projects. She also shares her ambitions as a researcher focused on the governance of international and internal forced migration across diverse contexts.
Can you tell us about your background and what inspired you to join GEM?
I have been working on issues of migration and displacement in various ways throughout my career. After working in immigration law in the United States, I completed a Master's degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to shift to international work on forced migration. I joined the Joint IDP Profiling Service in Geneva, Switzerland, where I collaborated with various UN organisations and governments to collect evidence on internal displacement. I worked increasingly with local and city-level actors, and soon recognised that their data needs and challenges were very different from those working at the central level. This inspired me to study urban governance, politics and planning through a PhD. In my project, I focused on how local governments develop responses to forced migration, with case studies spanning Colombia, Ukraine and the UK. I engaged with the research produced by the Global Exchange at COMPAS throughout, especially its PEAK and Inclusive Cities projects. I am thrilled to finally be part of the team behind this research.
What are your main research interests?
I am interested in the governance of internal and international forced migration, especially at the local level where state actors are closest to the people and communities affected. I am curious about all kinds of governance processes and practices that shape migration responses, for example how local authorities build capacity internally, how they use evidence, how they build partnerships, and how they work with other levels of government. Studying how decisions are made - and who sits at the table - helps to reveal wider power dynamics.
I am a human and political geographer interested in questions on the 'whereabouts of power' (Allen, 2004). To me this means investigating who has power within public sector decision-making, how they negotiate this and how it changes over time. Migration policymaking is an important site to study given the many and diverse actors involved in supporting processes of migrant inclusion or exclusion. The strategies that people develop to navigate these structures and to rebuild their lives are equally telling of their own struggles to regain power and agency.
Are there any trends or developments in your field that excite you right now?
I find the growing practice of collaborations between practitioners and researchers in public sector work highly promising, as it suggests a greater interest in evidence-based policymaking in general. The benefits go both ways - researchers are better able to ask policy-relevant questions and practitioners gain new data for their everyday work as well as prompts to reflect on their work more critically. Initiatives such as Westminster City Council's Urban Lab bring researchers squarely into local government problem-solving while the Refugee, Asylum, Migration and Policy (RAMP) project creates new collaborations in migration policymaking.
With expanding interest in participatory methods in migration research, there is always a danger that people with lived experience of migration are treated more as data subjects than as collaborators. I am excited to see this engagement conducted in a more meaningful way across the field by bringing people with lived experience into the research process from the outset: giving them a say in the direction of the project and opportunities to participate not only in the data collection but also in the analysis for shared ownership of the results.
Can you tell us more about the project you’ll be working on?
Theproject 'Enhancing community resilience and inclusion in cities and towns' asks how local authorities can develop the infrastructure around welcoming that enables a more consistent offer in different places, whether big cities or small towns.
In light of the government's agenda to devolve certain powers to local and regional administrations, we are exploring questions such as:
- Which services are best managed at the local and regional level for welcoming newcomers like migrants and refugees?
- Since smaller towns are often left out of migration research, what challenges do they face in undertaking this work?
- Finally, how can UK cities and towns learn from each other to build their collective capacity in this area?
I am excited to hear from local authorities on the often behind-the-scenes work they do to support their diverse communities.
What’s your long-term vision or goal as a researcher?
Long-term, I want research to be conducted in a way that helps us work better together. I believe that if research processes are transparent and collaborative, they can help more people trust and use the results. Open research processes are our best tool for adapting to complex policy problems, such as those framed and understood differently by different actors with no ready-made solutions (e.g. 'wicked problems' per Rittel & Webber, 1973). Migration policymaking is one such challenge. If discussions are based on robust evidence collected openly and collaboratively, my hope is we can focus on solving empirical problems and avoid the paralysing “crisis” framing of migration so often used in the media.
