Migration, Justice, & the Making of Futures
Routed Magazine and the Oxford Migration Studies Society are pleased to present this special issue alongside the 2026 Oxford Migration Conference. This year’s conference took place on June 5th and 6th at Green Templeton and St. Antony’s colleges in Oxford. Scholars, practitioners, activists, and artists from around the world gathered to consider what it might mean to collectively imagine a more just future. In an era of increasingly hostile governance, political contexts, and cultural attitudes, the conference centred the ways in which refugees, migrants, displaced communities, and their allies (re)imagine justice and care. Panels covered topics ranging from how climate mobility is mediated through infrastructures of power to the ways that people on the move build kinship models that shape advocacy, identity-formation, and knowledge production.
Drawing from 561 submissions from 83 different countries, this issue highlights the work of a wide range of contributors working to build a more just world. It includes submissions focused on the way that gender and sexuality shape experiences of migration in Africa, Bangladesh and Latin America. Some submissions also interrogate the legal and political dimensions of migration, discussing cities as justice-makers; who gets to speak; transitional justice in relation to returning to Syria; rights and recognition for Brazilian nurses in Germany; solidarity; and lived citizenship of refugee children in Indonesia. The issue also includes works that showcase the role of music, memory, and storytelling in migration narratives, from Sudanese theatre to Black, African and Afro-descendant women in Spain and Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Other submissions offer a reimagining of care, kinship, home, and relationality that can help readers envision what kind of world is possible, whether in relation to Yugoslav-Serb diaspora in the UK and their longing for yards; carrying home in a linden tree’s journey from Turkey to Switzerland; Haitian-Manoomin inter-species kinship; refugeetude and memory; and reimagining autism support through caregiver justice.
When it comes to imagining more just futures, we know that there is no singular path forward. Instead, this issue features a range of voices that push the boundaries of existing ways of thinking. Together, these authors offer an essential lesson: Justice is a collective endeavour. We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to all those who submitted their work for consideration, the organisers of this year’s conference, and the editorial team of this special issue.
The programme of the 2026 Oxford Migration Conference can be found HERE.
