Social Scientific Approaches to Equivocal Issue-Areas: the case of the ‘environmental migration’ nexus

Date: 05:00pm, Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Presenter/Convenor: Calum Nicholson, Swansea University

Location: Seminar Room One, QEH, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB

Series: Public Seminars

Since 2007, the relationship between environmental phenomena and human migration has gathered pace as an issue-area of technocratic concern, and thus as a field within migration scholarship. The literature and discussion is notable, however, for its conceptual chaos, panoply of terms and labels, and confusion of analytic and normative frameworks. 

This presentation attempts to first gain a critical distance from the chaos and establish a threshold for meaningful discussion. Having established this threshold, the argument will be made that, from an epistemological standpoint, there is simply no resolution to the 'environmental migration' conundrum that can be arrived at via an empirically grounded solution. Rather, If we're to arrive at a resolution, we need to instead attempt a dissolution of the issue-area, by reflecting on what purpose it served and why we find ourselves so gripped by it in spite of its manifestly equivocal nature as a theme of technocratic concern. 

In making this argument, the paper will also suggest an alternative use of social science that avoids such intellectual quagmires while still remaining relevant beyond the confines of the academy.