Pre-Conference Workshops
Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM (EST)
Location: Toronto Metropolitan University Campus (In-Person Only)
These pre-conference workshops offer an opportunity for in-depth engagement with the core themes of the Rethinking Complex Migration conference. Designed for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students, these sessions will be highly interactive, combining short presentations with discussion, small‑group activities, and hands-on activities. Participants will receive selected readings in advance to ground the sessions. Both sessions will run concurrently from 10:00 AM to 3:30 PM. Lunch and refreshments will be provided. The workshops are held in person only, on the Toronto Metropolitan campus.
Note: These workshops run concurrently. Participants may only register for one session. Space is strictly limited to 25 participants per workshop. Registration for the pre-conference workshops is not included with your ticket to the main conference.
Workshop A:
Big Data and Migration Research: Concepts, Data Infrastructures, and Analytical Horizons
Facilitated by Tuba Bircan, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
About the workshop
This workshop offers a structured and critical introduction to the use of big data in migration research. Rather than focusing on coding or technical implementation, the session provides a conceptual and methodological deep dive into the types of digital trace data currently transforming the field, their analytical potential, and their epistemic and ethical implications.
Migration is increasingly studied through data sources that were not originally produced for research purposes including but not limited to: mobile phone metadata, social media content, platform-based administrative data, satellite imagery, digital remittance traces, online search queries, and platform labour data. These sources promise scale, granularity and temporal depth, but they also raise fundamental questions about representation, bias, inference, and power.
The workshop will provide participants with a 360-degree overview of big data in migration research, structured around three pillars:
- Data infrastructures: What counts as big data in migration studies? How do digital trace data differ from surveys and registers?
- Analytical strategies: What kinds of research questions can (and cannot) be addressed with digital data?
- Ethics and governance: What are the methodological blind spots, risks of exclusion, and data justice concerns inherent in these approaches?
Drawing on concrete examples from recent literature and large-scale European research projects, participants will examine how big data has been used to study mobility patterns, integration trajectories, transnational networks, segregation, digital diasporas, and migration narratives. The emphasis will be on research design: how to formulate meaningful research questions, assess data suitability, and combine digital and conventional data sources.
The workshop will address the following core questions:
- What distinguishes digital trace data from traditional migration datasets in terms of coverage, bias, and inferential logic?
- How can big data complement, rather than replace, surveys, registers, and qualitative approaches?
- What kinds of migration phenomena (e.g., irregular mobility, return migration, emotional geographies, digital integration) become visible through platform data?
- What are the ethical, legal, and political risks of relying on privately owned data infrastructures?
- How can researchers design theoretically grounded and methodologically robust big data projects in migration studies?
Participants will leave with a conceptual toolkit to critically assess and design big-data-informed migration research projects, even if they do not possess advanced programming skills.
Workshop B:
Disrupting Research: Exploring Creative and Participatory Methods
Facilitated by Alka Kumar and Lara El Mekaui, Toronto Metropolitan University
About the workshop
This workshop focuses on exploring qualitative research methods, particularly creative and arts-based approaches to migration and mobilities research, employing them also in related interdisciplinary social sciences. Through hands-on activities, participants will engage in an interactive and conversation-based environment. Facilitators will share insights on community-engaged approaches, emphasizing the importance of collaborations between academics and community organizations. Key themes will include co-design, participatory frameworks, and ethical considerations.
Migration scholars often draw upon their own lived experiences and positionality as valuable sources of insight; however, these perspectives are still underutilized as critical tools in the field. This workshop highlights the significance of researcher situatedness, self-reflexivity, and co-production as methodological strategies that can generate knowledge in new and different ways. By engaging with autoethnographic, participatory, and arts-based approaches, participants will reflect on how centring personal narratives and community voices can challenge traditional hierarchies of expertise and contribute to more inclusive research practices.
The session will provide an opportunity to experiment with participatory design, collaborative storytelling, and creative inquiry. Together, we will consider how these approaches can enhance agency among research participants and partners, shift power dynamics within the field, and create innovative pathways for producing and sharing migration-related knowledge.
The workshop will address the following core questions:
- How do the researcher’s positionality and migrants’ lived experiences shape research design and methodological choices in migration studies?
- In what ways can alternative or arts‑based approaches add new dimensions to qualitative migration research?
- Why are participatory approaches important tools for understanding migrant experiences, and how can they support innovative knowledge production?
Participants will:
- Become familiar with participatory and creative research methodologies (e.g., storytelling, narrative and visual methods, arts-based approaches, and co-design and partnership-based studies).
- Reflect on ethical and relational dimensions of community-engaged research.
- Learn how participatory methods can complement more conventional research designs.
- Practice designing participatory methods for migration-focused research questions.