A Seminar jointly organised by the Mediterranean Institute and the Department of Anthropological Sciences within the Faculty of Arts

Guest Speaker: Josef Neubauer, Department for Migration and Globalisation, University for Continuing Education Krems

The Mediterranean Institute and the Department of Anthropological Sciences, Faculty of Arts are pleased to invite you to the seminar ‘Shifting migration strategies in dynamic migration regimes: Nepalis en route to Malta and beyond’. The guest speaker for this seminar is Josef Neubauer, from the Department for Migration and Globalisation, University for Continuing Education Krems.

Citizens of low-income countries face restrictive migration regimes around the world today. These regimes, however, are not rigid but in constant flux, as policymakers, employers, and commercial migration brokers scramble to steer migration to their benefit. How do aspiring migrants from low-income countries navigate this complex web of migration regimes and their dynamic changes?

This Seminar sketches out a new theoretical perspective and research agenda on this question. It proposes the concept migration strategies to analytically link people’s shifting migration aspirations, plans, and trajectories to their changing migration opportunity structures, shaped through individual forms of capital, migration policies, and dynamic ‘migration markets’. The presentation showcases the potency of this new concept by exploring how Nepalis who recently moved to Malta had dynamically adapted their migration strategies to take advantage of novel migration opportunities to Southern and Eastern Europe. By placing these empirical cases within the wider emigration context of Nepal, the presentation demonstrates how migration strategies—and their adaptations—are sensitive to different forms of capital and inequalities within low-income countries. Reversely, the example illustrates how changing migration regimes may eventually challenge and reshape social inequalities in low-income countries by inducing seismic shifts in people’s migration strategies.

Josef Neubauer is a Doctoral researcher at the Department for Migration and Globalisation, University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. He works on the processes, dynamics, and drivers of migration, and their links to social change, globalisation, and inequality.

Josef studied International Development Studies (MSc) at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, Migration and Global Development (MA) at the University of Sussex, and Political Science and Music Education (BA) at the University of Bremen. In winter 2021, he visited the University of Malta for fieldwork with the Nepali community in Malta. Josef is part of the Teaching Immigration in European Schools (TIES) project, which uses innovative learning modules to bring academic insights on migration into European classrooms.

Entry to the Seminar is free and open to the public. Students and interested researchers are particularly encouraged to attend. A Q&A session will follow on from the Seminar. Attendees are cordially invited to stay on for drinks and refreshments after the Seminar session. For more information or to reserve a seat, kindly contact Ms Isabelle Abela by email.