Introducing MIGMA
MIGMA is funded by the Research Council of Norway and headed by Prof. May-Len Skilbrei at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo. MIGMA started up in the fall of 2015 and will run for four years. UiO’s partners in the project are the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the Faculty of Law at the University of Bergen (UiB) and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS).
The overarching aim of MIGMA is to generate new knowledge about the effects and efficiency of the attempts to do migration management, the specific challenges this raises, and to make this knowledge relevant and accessible to a broad academic and non-academic audience. MIGMA’s empirical example of the practice of migration management will be return of migrants to Nigeria.
The postdoc project
The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will participate in a work package that aims to investigate how attempts to manage migration translate into empirical realities for their targets, in this case Nigerian migrants; “How migrants manage: (Self-) Representations of migrants”. This research involved the study of how policies designed and implemented 'from above' translates into empirical realities 'from below' as they are experienced and narrated through popular culture in Nigeria, including Nigerian films, popular music and literature and as they are experienced and narrated by returnees from Europe in Nigeria. The post doc researcher should undertake empirical research among Nigerian returnees in Nigeria as well as contribute towards our understanding of how migration and return are represented in Nigerian popular culture.
This work package will complement a work package that explores the regulation of return in a comparative perspective and a work package that explore the systemic logic by looking at return as a bureaucratic practice.
The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will be based at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo but will be expected to cooperate closely with Jørgen Carling, MIGMA’s partner at PRIO. The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will also be expected to be an active participant in the project meetings that will be organised at UiO, as well as in one of the research groups at the Faculty of Law at UiO. The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will be expected to publish findings in high-impact English language publications, take part in editing a book and disseminate MIGMA results to end-users.