20th IMISCOE Annual Conference MIGRATION AND INEQUALITIES. In search of answers and solutions

Ivana Rapoš Božič recently attended the 20th IMISCOE Annual Conference in Poland, where she actively participated by presenting our collaborative work titled “People like us?”: A reverse sociology of migration. The conference, focused on migration and inequalities, provided the perfect platform for Ivana to introduce our innovative approach to cultural sociology and migration studies. Our research, centered around residents' experiences with a migratory background, challenges the conventional perspective that often dominates migration studies.

Residents with a migratory background have long faced a difficult (even if unspoken) question: are you “people like us”? The “us” is taken-for-granted, understood through terms like “majority society,” “mainstream society,” and “host society.” Even the study of migration has largely been a story that privileges the perspectives of the “us” in destination societies. This becomes most apparent with respect to the one-sided focus of most scholarly debates on migration attitudes and integration. We argue that in order to understand the complex patterns of boundary work that take place in post-migrant societies, we need to move beyond taking the perspective of “us” for granted. We propose a novel approach that “reverses” the perspective and makes the residents with a migratory background our sociological “mainstream. We are interested in the ways these residents engage in symbolic boundary work when imagining what “people like us” means to them. Our three-fold theoretical and methodological contribution is framed by a “reverse sociology,” allowing for deep and critical reflection upon boundary-work processes. First, we discuss possible ways to reflexively formulate questions that frame the research. Second, we pay close attention to labeling practices, emphasizing the need to understand how residents with a migratory background understand their positionality when engaging with established migration labels. Finally, we seek to upend the prevailing perspective on studying integration processes, often investigated from the perspective of the receiving society’s institutions. The goal is to understand how residents with migratory background see those institutions and the ways they interact with them.