Call for Papers: Local Jobs, Global Lives? High-skilled migrants navigating transnational mobility and local embeddedness,11 –12 December 2025
This interdisciplinary workshop—organized as a joint collaboration between the Radboud University Network on Migrant Inclusion (RUNOMI), the GLOCAL (Global–Local Divides and Connections) research hotspot and the Sector Plan Social Inequality and Diversity —invites scholars to explore high-skilled migration as a multifaceted phenomenon shaped by tensions between mobility and rootedness, privilege and exclusion, global aspirations and local entanglements. Building on the concepts of partial exit and elective belonging (Andreotti et al. 2012; Savage et al. 2005), we aim to expand theoretical and empirical approaches to high-skilled migration across diverse contexts.
We welcome contributions from sociology, anthropology, migration studies, geography, political science, urban studies, cultural studies, and related fields.
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
• Partial Exit and Selective Rootedness: How do high-skilled migrants balance global trajectories with local attachments? (Andreotti et al. 2015)
• Labeling and Identity Work: How are categories like “expat” or “elite” constructed, challenged, or internalized? (Bielewska 2021; Meier 2015)
• Urban Strategies and Classed Space: What spatial and symbolic strategies do highly skilled migrants enact in shaping and navigating urban environments? (Savage et al. 2005; Andreotti et al. 2014)
• Bi/multifocality: How do high-skilled migrants develop their strategies and navigate opportunities by engaging with multiple locations and diverse social groups, moving beyond the traditional home–host country dichotomy? (Vertovec, 2004; Solano et al., 2022)
• Digitalization: What is the impact of digitalization on the mobility and embeddedness of high-skilled migrants? (Leurs, 2023)
• Beyond the Global North: What dynamics emerge when high-skilled migration occurs in or through semi-peripheral, post-socialist or less studied regions? (Favell & Recchi 2009; Bielewska 2021)
We particularly encourage submissions that adopt intersectional, critical, or transnational approaches, and that challenge dominant assumptions around meritocracy, privilege, and (migrant) integration/inclusion.
Selected papers are planned to be included in a special issue proposal to be submitted to Global Networks journal.
Submission Guidelines
Please send a 200-word abstract and a short bio (max 100 words) to: francesco.cerchiaro@ru.nl and giacomo.solano@ru.nl
Deadline for submissions: 7 September 2025
Notification of acceptance: 29 September 2025
The workshop will take place in person on 11-12 December 2025 at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands).
Participation is free.
For more details, refer here
