IMISCOE 2025 Summer School is being organized by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT) at the University of Lisbon and the Critical Heritage Studies Hub at Jagiellonian University. Exploring the theme of ‘Developing a sensory methodology in migration studies’, the summer school will take place at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Lisbon.
For the 2025 edition of the IMISCOE PhD school, the organizers aim at training PhD candidates and early career researchers affiliated at institutions around the world to develop visual and sensory methodologies in migration research. They use the term “methodology” as they believe that visual and sensory projects ought to be embedded in a broader research project. Concretely, that means that participants will be encouraged to critically assess the theoretical, empirical, and ethical implications of their methodological choices.
In the training programme, the organizers will focus on the use of four visual media to research the multisensory experiences of migration scholars and of the ones who have experienced migration, but also migration processes and policies. Those media are photography, film, cartography, and collaborative methods. In that sense, they propose establishing conceptual links between the intellectual and the sensorial, by designing research methodologies that do not omit the data coming from the multisensory experiences of doing visual research. The training also provides hands-on activities and good practices helping to rethink our research questions; get acquainted with the literature; combine visual methodologies with other modes of data collection - qualitative interviews, discussion groups, walk-alongs, observations, etc; expand our analytical toolbox; and potentially create visual and sensory outputs for dissemination.
Inter- and transdisciplinary in its focus, this IMISCOE PhD school channels the methodological knowledge developed within disciplines such as geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, and gender, sexuality and women’s study into a practical methodological approach, with a wide range of useful research tools adapted to the analysis of migration experiences, processes and policies. The aim is to provide a full package of knowledge on research planning using visual and sensory methods, including a critical analysis of the epistemological foundations of research methodology, the ontological status of produced and existing images, ethical manifesto, techniques for disseminating research conclusions and generating impact, and the selection of appropriate tools for collecting data.
The programme will be divided into three modules:
theoretical (methodology, epistemology, ontology of images, ethics);
a collective research project in Lisbon (creating a visual research project under the supervision of the trainers);
development of individual research projects of the participants (planning, ethics, research methods and techniques, dissemination of results, impact).
For application details visit https://www.imiscoe.org/events/2216-2025-phd-school
Online application form can be found here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf_iWWqlmIqMTLgM2jJpvkoZUPqLy1LkpJEpIPt-W13bYhdvQ/viewform