Entanglements of Migration and Time in Post-industrial Urban Europe (MITIME)

Entanglements of Migration and Time in Post-industrial Urban Europe (MITIME) is a pioneering interdisciplinary doctoral programme. Led by the University of Oulu and funded by the 2024 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network call, MITIME trains highly skilled doctoral candidates in critical issues of migration, integration and societal change facing Europe today. The programme seeks to train early-career scholars from across fields and disciplines, while stimulating their creativity, augmenting their innovation capacities and enhancing their employability in and beyond the academy.

MITIME challenges conventional understandings of human mobility, which typically see migratory processes as linear trajectories—from departure to journey to arrival to settlement. The programme seeks to show that normative, narrowly framed conceptualisations of how people move cannot effectively capture the diversified patterns of migration and integration in contemporary Europe. MITIME uses the critical lens of temporality as a means of bringing new, disruptive insights to existing understandings of mobility and diversity in post-industrial European cities—spaces in which socio-economic inequalities have grown deeper in the transition out of the industrial era, driven by structural changes in the global economy. It generates innovative approaches and methods for researching and supporting social inclusion and for combatting inequalities and injustices, using five core frames of study: connectivities; labour; placemaking; narrative; and governance

Led by Cultural Anthropology at Oulu, the programme builds and and draws from the collaborative interdisciplinary expertise of UNIC, the European University of Post-Industrial Cities consortium (www.unic.eu), aligning seven leading universities for migration research alongside ten Associated Partners from the third sector and civil society. All told, MITIME will provide 15 doctoral candidates with cutting-edge, cross-sectoral training, transversal skills and know-how for tackling, in interdisciplinarily fashion, one of the planet's most critical socio-political issues.

Programnme Partners
Ruhr University Bochum (Prof. Margit Fauser)
University of Liège (Dr. Elsa Mescoli)
University College Cork (Dr. Caitríona Ní Laoire)
Koç University (Prof. Ahmet Içduygu)
University of Deusto (Dr. Bilge Yabanci)
Erasmus University Rotterdam (Prof. Peter Scholten)

Associated Partners
Cork Migrant Center
City of Oulu
Gernika Gogoratuz Peace Research Center
International Center for Migration Policy Development
INTERSOS Hellas
Liège Theatre
North-Rhine Westphalia Regional Directorate of the German Federal Employment Agency
Regional Center for the Integration of Foreigners
UNESCO ETXEA