Call for Papers for the Journal Diasporas on Self-Writing and Migration

18. Februar 2026

The editors of Diasporas invite proposals for articles, in French or English, on the experience of migration carried out by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, wherever they come from, throughout the 19th and 20th century.

Priority will be given to the following themes, which are non-exclusive and often mutually permeable:

  • Forms and strategies of integration into the host scholarly environment: analyzing and measuring adaptation (but also possible resistance) to the use of another language, to different forms and registers of scientific writing; to the methods, but also to the working, teaching, information-gathering and processing practices that prevail in the host institutions; to new places of scientific practice and the conventions that are specific to them.
  • The relationship with objects and workplaces: books, archives, museum objects and collections, fields, excavation sites... How does the relationship change with the materiality of objects of study and workplaces no longer available or accessible? How are methods being transformed in the face of these shortages?
  • The way in which local researchers and immigrant scholars perceive and describe changes in their discipline as a result of the latter’s arrival; the rise of disciplinary mythologies linked to migration (in art history, for example, the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of a narrative of the origins of the discipline in the United States in which the arrival of German-speaking researchers in the 1930s played a central role).
  • The effects of censorship and self-censorship, particularly regarding the difficulties encountered in the new scholarly environment, the welcome given to migrants by locals, forms of professional protectionism, stereotypes about migrants that develop in the host area, and anti-Semitism in the case of Jewish scholars. The material and financial situation of migrant researchers is also one of the subjects most rarely raised in the texts they produce.
  • The relationship with politics in the host country, whether in terms of immigrant scholars’ view of local political life, and their possible participation in it, or more specifically their role in university politics and in creating more or less informal assistance structures for migrants.
  • The gendered dimension of scholarly migration: how does migration impact the trajectory of female researchers, and how does it influence their collective visibility in the world of scientific work?
  • Finally, examining the role that migration plays in the construction of a public image of the scholar, and the possible specificity of the trajectories of researchers in the humanities and social sciences compared to those in other disciplines.

Deadline for submisisons: March 16, 2026 | DETAILS

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