Interdisciplinary perspectives on migration and asylum

Migration and asylum are highly complex phenomena that impact many different aspects of social life. Addressing migration and asylum therefore calls for a plurality of analytical perspectives which, taken together, can provide a more comprehensive understanding. Interdisciplinarity is a crucial tool to unravel some of this inherent complexity and can serve to illuminate those aspects of migration and asylum that remain hidden, unknown, or distorted when only using a single lens of analysis. By bringing together empirical insights, theoretical advances, and methodological pluralism across disciplinary boundaries—and extending beyond academia—we can more effectively identify the current shortcomings of migration policy and governance. The upcoming DEMIG Talk series aims to highlight the diversity of disciplines that relate to the field of migration, emphasizing the importance of combining different angles to better grasp human mobility whilst also calling for increasing cross-pollination and knowledge exchange.

The series launches on 18 September 2025 with a keynote by Katharina Natter, Senior Assistant Professor at Leiden University, entitled  Between knowledge and assumptions: The migrant in the eyes of the policymaker. This hybrid event explores how European migration policies engage with expert knowledge—whether used, ignored, or misused—and how these practices shape the portrayal of migrants across different policy fields and national contexts.

Between knowledge and assumptions: The migrant in the eyes of the policymaker

Katharina Natter, Leiden University  

Thursday, 18 September 2025, 14:00-15:00 CEST | hybrid format: University for Continuing Education Krems, Room SE W 1.03 + online (Link to the Zoom meeting)

What role does expert knowledge play in migration policymaking? While previous research focused on differentiating instrumental from symbolic knowledge use, this paper advances scholarly insights into equally important, yet under-theorized knowledge practices: knowledge non-use and misuse. Based on a comparative analysis of justification narratives surrounding Austrian, Italian and Dutch migration reforms since the 2000s, this paper delves into knowledge use dynamics across three policy areas: counter-smuggling, asylum reception, and migrant worker attraction. The analysis shows how “the migrant” is portrayed in fundamentally different ways across policy areas, with clear consequences on whether knowledge is used, cherry-picked, disregarded, or even distorted. 

Bio: Katharina Natter is Senior Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. She researches migration politics from a comparative perspective, with a particular focus on the role of political regimes in immigration policymaking. Katharina’s work seeks to advance migration policy theory and to connect it with broader social science research on modern statehood and political change. Hereby, she also hopes to contribute to the wider academic effort of bridging theorizations of socio-political processes in the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’.

Katharina has conducted extensive field research on the politics of migration in Morocco and Tunisia, but has also worked on European migration policies and on the link between migration and development. She has published in International Migration Review, Population and Development Review, Political Research Exchange, Comparative Migration Studies and the Journal of North African Studies. Her recent book, The Politics of Immigration Beyond Liberal States: Morocco and Tunisia in Comparative Perspective, has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

Katharina received her PhD in Political Sociology from the University of Amsterdam in 2019. Prior to that, she worked at the International Migration Institute (University of Oxford) and studied Comparative Politics at SciencesPo Paris. Since 2011, she is also involved in Asylos, an NGO providing Country of Origin research for lawyers representing asylum seekers.