From Migratory Transnationalism to Welcoming Cities: Meeting Thomas Lacroix
Thomas Lacroix has joined the CERI in September 2021. A Specialist of migration for decades, his recent work has focused on how cities welcome foreigners, migrants, and on the networks these cities may form. Thomas will with no doubt contribute to one of the CERI's research fields. He has agreed to answer our questions on his research path and trajectory.
Can you briefly present to us your academic trajectory and your past research, and tell us about your research interests?
It seems to me that my trajectory, which has been somewhat winding, says something about the French academic reception of the issue of international migration. I discovered the topic when I was a masters’ student at the Institut d’études politiques (IEP) in Lille. After obtaining my degree in 1998, I wanted to start a PhD on the migratory transnationalism of Moroccans in Europe. But my project was accepted neither at the IEP in Lille, nor at the IEP in Paris. This may seem surprising today, but at the end of the 1990s, the issue of international migration was not studied much by political scientists—indeed the topic was somewhat marginal.
Therefore, I did my PhD in geography at Migrinter, a research laboratory at the University of Poitiers, co-supervised by Patrick Gonin and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden. After my PhD, I went to Morocco and to the United Kingdom, first at the university of Warwick as a postdoctoral researcher between 2005 and 2007 and later at Oxford as a research fellow (2008-2011). I came back to Migrinter, in France, when I was hired by the CNRS in 2011. During this period, I developed my research activities on immigrant transnationalism, first by investigating new groups: Algerians in France, Indians and Poles in the UK; and then by addressing new theoretical and empirical issues: the diversity of cross border associational activities, the configurations of transnational families, the relation between transnationalism and integration, the EU migration policy, the Moroccan diaspora policy, etc. After the end of my term as Migrinter deputy director in 2011, I applied for a research position at the Maison Française of Oxford. My stay at the Maison Française d’Oxford helped me to redirect my work on the role of cities and city networks in the welcoming of migrants. It is from this perspective that I am joining the CERI and its research group on migration.
What are your current research themes?
Today, the issue of migration has found its place in political science in France. But this legitimacy is relatively recent and its scope is not yet completely stabilised. I believe that there are two main research orientations: the state in the face of migration flows (its politics, mechanisms, migration diplomacy, etc.), and migrants as subjects of public policies. I hope to bring to the debate a new perspective, drawing on political geography.
Since my PhD, I have been interested in the transnational societies that migrants constitute spanning the borders of departure and settlement countries. Today, I focus on the making of transnational states, starting from the hypothesis that states transnationalise by trying to deal with the flows of humans, money, and ideas generated by migration. I am particularly interested in networks of cities formed around the welcoming of migrants, their integration, and the fight against discrimination. There are about sixty of these networks in the world, be they national, regional or intercontinental, and they have become central actors in the governance of migrations. They promote a more open approach to migration than national public authorities.
Are you part of collective projects at the CERI and/or other centres and departments?
My work on city networks is part of the ANR PACE project headed by Hélène Thiollet from the CERI. This programme deals with non-state actors of migration politics. Together with Aisling Healy from TRIANGLE, I am in charge of a research group on cities. Additionally, I am in charge of the Localacc programme on welcoming cities, with Bénédicte Michalon (UMR PASSAGES, Bordeaux).
Beyond this object of research, I have many scholarly interests. I will just mention two programmes that I lead. One is the programme “Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces”, which deals with the moral dimension of how death is dealt with during migration. This programme is also a exciting epistemological experience, because we have managed to gather together, with my colleagues from the universities of Montpellier and Hong Kong, scholars coming from the social sciences, literary studies, and the arts, to mix our perspectives on a topical phenomenon.
Another is the CRITMIGR programme, which I co-direct with Camille Schmoll (EHESS) and Swanie Potot (URMIS). This cycle of webinars is born from the need to think of the status of critique in migration studies. The current environment of the study of migrations has become so violent (here I refer to violence against migrants as well as scholars targeted by populists) that it seems important to take the necessary step back to think about researchers as critics and research as critique.
What are your projects, what do you wish to focus on in the next few years?
I have only just started to work on cities and more widely on transnational states and their evolution. It is going to keep me busy for the next few years. However, my work is also close to current events, and current issues are those of migrations in a post-pandemic world. The period that we have been through, as any period of crisis, corresponds to a moment of recomposition and acceleration of deeper dynamics. The closing of European borders has echoed the rise of populism, while South-South circulations have increased to an unprecedented level—they have become more important than south-north migrations). The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration has constituted a major step in the governance of migration. Some people have even started to think of China as an immigration country because of its demographic decline… We need both the theoretical and methodological tools to understand this planet of migration in the making. We have started to work on this issue with the team at the CERI and with colleagues from the IRD as well as mathematicians specialising in artificial intelligence.
Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI
Photograph: copyright Thomas Lacroix
