European Project led by GCU on the rol of volunteering in migrant integration. Project funded under the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund. See for more information here. 

Mapping urban diversities

Seed funding for new project, awarded under the Erasmus Initiative 'Vital Cities and Citizens', on 'Mapping Urban Diversities.' 

CROSS-MIGRATION aims to promote knowledge integration in the field of migration studies. It will focus on a number of key knowledge questions around migration flows, drivers and infrastructures, and the interaction between these flows/drivers/infrastructures and policies. The project has 15 institutional partners from all over Europe, and will be associated to IMISCOE. More information, see www.crossmigration.eu or www.migrationresearch.com 

ReSOMA aims at the creation of a Research-Social Platform on Migration & Asylum, seeking to initiate dialogues on research and social innovation with key stakeholders from the local, national and EU level. The project runs from 2018 tot 2020. For more info: see www.resoma.eu. 

New research project on Innovation in Refugee Integration Strategies

With assistance of the Department of Social Affairs, I've started a new research project on the governance of refugee integration in a number of European countries. The aim of the project is to collect evidence of innovative governance strategies in response to refugee immigration. The project will focus at national as well as selected local cases, within these countries: Germany, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Italy. The project will be implemented with a team of 6 researchers, drawn also from the Master Governance of Migration & Diversity.  

Tsunami or tragedy? Media attention and framing in relation to immigration policies in the Netherlands (WODC, 2015)

For the full study, click here. English Summary: 

This study aims to develop a better understanding of patterns of media-attention and media-framing of issues related to Dutch immigration policies and the influence of media-attention and -framing on politics and policies. The research focuses on sixteen cases in the period 2011-2015 including cases with relatively low as well as relatively high levels of media-attention. This enables us to compare the cases on the aspect of media-attention as well as the implications of media attention for policies. Our cases vary in another respect as well: some cases concern concrete and visible individuals or groups, while other cases concern more abstract phenomena or policy proposals.

Beyond National Models of Integration? A multi-level perspective on agenda dynamics and policy change (NWO, Dutch Science Foundation VENI project)
Immigrant integration policies are commonly described in terms of ‘national models of integration’, such as the French Republican model or the Dutch Multicultural model. This idea of consistent and coherent national models is challenged by the increasingly multi-level dynamics of policy agendas in this domain. Integration policies have acquired a multi-level character and waves of public and political attention to integration problems are often unpredictable and uncontrollable. Policies at various levels can follow specific paths of development, involving different ways of defining and acting upon (‘framing’) immigrant integration. This can complicate the effective multi-level governance of immigrant integration. Therefore, this research analyzes the relation between agenda dynamics on local, national and European levels and the multi-level governance of immigrant integration. The project develops a comparative perspective involving the European, national (France, the UK and the Netherlands) and local level (six cities). Peter has received an individual research grant (VENI) for this research project, which will be finished in 2004. See: link.

IMAGINATION: Urban Consequences and Local Governance of CEE Migration (Urban Europe)
The IMAGINATION project focuse on migration from Central and Eastern-European (CEE) countries This project raises the question what the consequences are of this type of mobility for urban cohesion and urban policies. This involves (1) an identification of types of migration from CEE countries, (2) an analysis of social implications of these types of migration for the receiving urban regions (3) an analysis of governance approaches by local governments in the receiving urban regions to these social implications. The project focuses on urban regions in Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey and includes the perspective of the CEE countries themselves as well.  The project is coordinated by the Erasmus University. See: www.project-imagination.eu

DIAMINT: Science-Society Dialogues on Migration and Integration in Europe (VolkswagenStiftung)
DIAMINT is an international comparative project that is coordinated by the Erasmus University Rotterdam. The focus is on the role that the social sciences have played in shaping public understanding of processes of immigrant integration. The project analysis how over the past few decades research–policy dialogues on these processes have developed into a much more complex science-society dialogue in several European countries. This is done from the perspective of the changing role of science in a society that itself is also in transformation. In today’s science-society dialogues, scientific knowledge no longer seems accepted merely as objective knowledge. Citizens appear increasingly reflective in terms of their acceptance (or criticism) of knowledge claims. Furthermore, the contextuality of knowledge claims has become increasingly manifest as science-society dialogues have opened up and internationalized. Finally, there has been a growing recognition of the uncertainty of scientific knowledge. The research provides an in-depth analysis of how the social transformations just mentioned have contributed to a reconfiguration of science-society dialogues on immigrant integration in a number of European countries (Austria, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom) as well as on the EU- level. See: www.diamint.eu

UniteEurope; the role of ICT-tools in the E-Governance of Immigrant Integration (FP7 project)
UniteEurope aims at giving the main actors of integration – immigrants and members of the host societies – a voice by analysing public Social Media contents generated by citizens. This bottom-up approach allows revealing urban integration issues as they are actually experienced by those concerned. Thereby, the UniteEurope tool is meant to enable local decision makers to identify focal points, but also positive developments, as well as to initiate effective, efficient and sustainable integration measures and policies. An extensive in-depth analysis of urban administration as well as integration issues and measures, mainly gathered by qualitative methods of social research, should serve as the basis for software development. In close cooperation between social scientists and IT-specialists, an integration issue grid model with multi-layer logic patterns will be used for consistent categorisation of relevant integration areas (e.g. education, business, culture, etc.) in cities. Coherent layers with multilingual semantic tags, significant sources and parameters will make up the logical core of the tool. UniteEurope supports operational integration measures and strategic policy development at regional and pan-European level. The UniteEurope team consists of experts in E-Government, Social Media and integration from leading universities and competence centres, as well as system architects, software developers, companies, cities and NGOs from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. The team is counselled by international NGOs dealing with immigration, integration and asylum issues. The UniteEurope project is coordinated by INSET from Austria. The Erasmus University Research team is primarily involved with the social-scientific analysis of integration issues and local integration policies on which the ICT tools for social media analysis are to be developed. See www.uniteeurope.org.

UPSTREAM: Developing Effective Strategies for the Mainstreaming of Integration Governance (EIF project)
This project analyses how, why and to what effect governments at the EU, national and local level mainstream their migrant integration policies. Mainstreaming means embedding integration into generic policies for the entire population. The project aims to promote a learning process in terms of policy coordination, practices and outcomes in the governance of migrant integration. It asks the central question ‘What are the obstacles and opportunities that mainstreaming generates in terms of migrant integration policies and outcomes?’ Besides an EU case, five country cases were selected: the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, France and Poland. The country cases involve an analysis of national policies and policies in two cities (one major and one medium-sized city). Cases: – EU level – The Netherlands (Rotterdam, the Hague) – The UK (Bristol, Peterborough) – France (Paris and Lille) – Spain (Madrid and Barcelona) – Poland (Warsaw and Poznan). The project will start at December 1st 2013. Erasmus University (Dr. P.W.A. Scholten) is coordinator of this project, in which the following partners are involved: Center on Migration, Policy and Society – University of Oxford, Migration Policy Institute Europe, Universitat Complutense de Madrid, Institute National d’Etudes Demographiques (INED) and the Center for Migration Research in Warsaw. See: www.project-upstream.eu

MECLEP: Migration, Environment and Climate Change (EU project)
MECLEP aims to contribute to the global knowledge base on the relationship between migration and environmental change, including climate change. The innovative research will aim to formulate policy options on how migration can benefit adaptation strategies to environmental and climate change. For more info: link.