A week after the Research Day on ‘Migration and Technology’ took place, we would like to throw back to this inspiring event. It offered BIRMM researchers the opportunity to connect with fellow academics from partner universities and to explore new, burgeoning academic research strands investigating the manifold linkages between migration and technology from a variety of perspectives. BIRMM co-organized the event together with CESSMIR (Ghent University), MIGLOBA (Antwerp University) on the 7th of November.
The Research Day was structured into two main sessions, with the morning devoted to keynote lectures and the afternoon to more interactive workshops enabling the participants to delve more deeply into the subjects addressed by the speakers during the morning. The latter revolved around three main areas, which included the following:
Big Data and Migration Studies.
Social media and migration through the approach of online ethnography.
Technology in migration and border enforcement.
Among the distinguished professors that held lectures and the subsequent workshops, BIRMM researcher Prof. Dr. Tuba Bircan gave a keynote on 'Leveraging the Power of Big Data in Migration Research', which zoomed in on some the results of BIRMM’s HumMingBird project regarding the application of Big Data and AI in migration monitoring, analysis and forecasting. She also emphasized the urgency of building bridges between migration studies and data science. In her words, "data scientists do not do theory, they answer what-questions, not why-questions", and "big private companies often own the big data but they care less about ethical protocols". "These are some of the reasons why migration and social science researchers should engage with big data", she argued.
Some of the participants’ testimonies attest to the extremely interdisciplinary approach of the event and to the innovative views and research angles that the lecturers aimed to convey:
“This experience was an unprecedented opportunity to discover a side of migration studies that I had not yet been able to encounter in my academic career. Given the increasing role of technology in our era, I learned that it is crucial to assess its role and effects and to question them so as not to fall into an overly idealistic perception of the perfect answer to any migration or security issue.”
“It has increased my awareness of the relevance of fostering interdisciplinarity and enhance cooperation between data scientists and social scientists for the improvement of research in the field of migration and of international migration governance.”