Season 3, Ep. 6: How do I decentre that?

Below, you will find links to all of the research referenced by our guests, as well as other resources you may find useful.

More about the Projects

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective  (GTDF)  (external link) 

The Global (De)Centre (GDC) (external link) 

First night in Tehranto: Memories and reflections of Toronto’s Iranian immigrants

Donate or Get Involved

22nd IMISCOE Annual Conference. (1-4 July 2025). Decentering migration studies (external link) .

Media & Blogs

Decolonial Futures Collective (external link) . Youtube Channel.

Levitt, P. (February 27, 2023). Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre (external link) . Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen – Monthly Lecture Series. Youtube.

Books & Book Chapters

Jimmy, E., Andreotti, V., & Stein, S. (2019).  (PDF file) Towards braiding (external link) . Musagetes.

Levitt, P., Dobbs, E., Sun, K. C. Y., & Paul, R. (2023). Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders. Oxford University Press.

Moghadam, A. (2022). Migrants and their cultural world: When things teach us about lives (external link) . In Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies (pp. 255-263). Routledge.

Raghuram, P. and Sondhi, G. (forthcoming).  (PDF file) ‘Decolonising this, decolonising that: beyond rhetorical decolonisation in migration studies’ (external link) . In Dahinden, J and Potts, A. (ed.) Reflexivities and Knowledge Production in Migration Studies. Springer International Publishing (IMISCOE Research Series).

Scholarly Articles

Anderson, B. (2019). New directions in migration studies: towards methodological de-nationalism (external link) . Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1), 1-13.

Dahinden, J. (2016). A plea for the ‘de-migranticization’ of research on migration and integration (external link) . Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), 2207–2225. 

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2020). Introduction: Recentering the South in studies of migration (external link) . Migration and Society, 3(1), 1-18.

Lee, K., Levitt, P., & Valdivia-Moreno, C. (2024). Migrating arts with (out) migrating artists: Decentering the global art world (external link) . Social Forces, soae179.

Levitt, P. (2023, September). Decentering migration studies: Toward a Southern attitude (external link) . In Sociological Forum, 38(3), pp. 856-864.

Levitt, P., Rutherford, M., & Saferstein, E. (2024). Epistemic decentering: Toward a more equitable pedagogy. (external link)  History of Humanities, 9(1), 163-178.

Levitt, P., Saferstein, E., Jaber, R., & Shin, D. (2023). Decolonizing Decoloniality: Decentering Art History and Comparative Literature Classrooms Outside Europe and the United States (external link) . Comparative Education Review, 67(2), 277-297.

Moghadam, A. (2024). The comedian, the poet and the philanthropist: Transnational cultural actors and social remittances between Dubai and southern Iran (external link) . SOCIAL REMITTANCES, 107.

Moghadam, A. (2021). The making of a Cosmo-nationalistic trajectory: Iranian cultural entrepreneurs in Tehran and Dubai (external link) . Journal of Arabian Studies, 11(2), 243-261.

Moghadam, A. (2021). The staging of cultural diversity in Dubai: the case of Dubai Art Fair. (external link)  Identities, 28(6), 717-733.

Moghadam, A., & Jadali, S. (2022). Immigration and revolution in Iran: Asylum politics and state consolidation (external link) . REMHU: Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana, 29, 21-41.

Olakpe, O., & Triandafyllidou, A. (2023). Migrations between Africa and China: A decentered approach (external link) . African Human Mobility Review, 9(2), 5-15.

Raghuram, P., & Sondhi, G. (forthcoming).  (PDF file) Decolonising this, decolonising that: beyond rhetorical decolonisation in migration studies (external link) . In Dahinden, J and  A. Potts (Eds.) Reflexivities and knowledge production in migration studies. Springer International Publishing (IMISCOE Research Series).

Rutherford, M. B., Levitt, P., & Zhang, E. (2024). Whence the 3 percent?: How far have we Come toward decentering America’s literary preference (external link) ?. Global Perspectives, 5(1), 93034.

Triandafyllidou, A. (2022). Decentering the study of migration governance: A radical view. (external link)  Geopolitics, 27(3), 811-825.

Vlase, I. (2024). Unlocking the potential of the decolonial approach in migration studie (external link) s. Sociology Compass, 18(9), e70004.

Vanyoro, K.  (2024). Chronopolitics: Decolonising African migration studies (external link) . Critical African Studies, 16(3): 399-414.

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, a podcast that explores innovative migration research and connects the dots to real world impacts. This series is produced by CERC Migration in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. I'm Maggie Perzyna, a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Today, we're tackling a critical question that seems to be dominating international research agendas, "how do we break the grasp of Western social theories and methods", and "what does it truly mean to decentre research?" A growing network of scholars from across the world is committed to producing new kinds of knowledge. Migration studies have long been dominated by Western paradigms that often prioritize control, security and economic perspectives, leaving out the lived realities of migrants and the rich alternative ways of understanding mobility in the Global South. Decentring this research means challenging these Eurocentric models, amplifying diverse perspectives, and rethinking power dynamics and knowledge production. It's about shifting the focus to the voices, experiences and insights that have been historically sidelined. But first, let's look at an example of how we can rethink our systems of learning and being. The "Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective" is an arts and research group that challenges us to confront the colonial habits ingrained in Western society. They collaborate with students and organizations to create projects that span art, education, and relational experiments, all aimed at helping us to decentre our perspectives and to rethink how we learn and relate to one another and to the planet. If it sounds like a daunting task, that's because it is, but it's also an urgent and necessary one. As we face growing global challenges, rethinking how we learn and connect with each other and the world around us isn't just important. It's essential. 

Sharon Stein  

When we look at what's happening around the world, when we look at increasingly erratic weather and droughts, and when we look at political shifts, especially towards right wing populism, and we look at growing anti-immigration discourse, when we look at increasing economic austerity and financial difficulties, we can see that we might be coming to the limits of the system that we have now,. And this is always a very difficult time. That system, number one, is not going to give up easily. 

Maggie Perzyna  

That's Sharon Stein. She's an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, and one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, or the GTDF Collective,

Sharon Stein  

My work is really about inviting people. And the verb invite is really important because a lot of critical work is sort of framed in ways that focus on being right or righteous about a particular social or ecological challenge. 

Maggie Perzyna  

To avoid pointing fingers or creating feelings of shame, Sharon's approach focuses on understanding the systems that shape our daily lives, especially colonial systems that allow us to reap the privileges and benefits but tend to hide the colonial costs of those benefits and how they disproportionately affect marginalized groups. Some of Sharon's work happens through GTDF, an international arts and research collective that connects researchers all over the world.

Sharon Stein  

It's really a collaboration about trying to approach these systemic challenges differently. Seeing them as something that requires us to rethink the way we relate to the world and to other people and to other than human beings. And that's not about inviting blame or shame on the part of folks like us in the Global North or settlers like me but rather inviting us into a deeper space of responsibility. 

Maggie Perzyna  

The collective was officially founded eight years ago, but Sharon says her and her fellow founders have been doing the work in the background years before the GTDF was born.

Sharon Stein  

It emerged out of this ongoing inquiry that I had with some of the original founders of the collective about a different kind of education .And education that could activate this sense of responsibility. It was always about inviting practices and pedagogies that could interrupt our satisfaction with the systems as they currently operate, and activating other possibilities for knowing, being and relating. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Now, GTDF works with educators, artists, conservationists, health professionals and scientists who help push the boundaries of what's possible in their fields. Together, they're working to reimagine how our world could work without the colonial systems we are so used to existing within. Systems like education. 

Sharon Stein  

One of the things that tends to happen in western education and western universities is that we think that education is really only an intellectual project. We think it's about more knowledge, because we think the problem is ignorance. But our analysis says that it's not that we don't have the knowledge right? That we would need to see the limits of these system, it's that we deny, you know, the implications of this knowledge, the implications of our complicity in harm. So, if the problem is denial, right, denial of unsustainability, denial of colonial complicity, denial of our entanglement, denial of the complexity of the challenges we face and we need a very different kind of education. 

Education is delivered in many different ways around the world. GTDF works closely with their sister network in Brazil called the Teia da Cinco Curas—translating to “The Web of Five Cures.” Together, they’re collaborating with the Huni Kui Indigenous People of Acre to redevelop their colonial framework into a new iteration of their education system: The University of the Forest.  

Sharon Stein  

When we started talking about how education in our different contexts differed, they pointed out, well, we also have a university. The Amazon forest is actually our university, and the president of our university is the Sama Uma tree, which is this enormous, amazing tree that they have in the Amazon. And they said, you know, our university of the forest is place based. It is the education that we've had for since time immemorial that prepares young people to be caretakers of this place and lets them know and teaches them that they are not just caretakers of the forest, but they're part of the forest as well. 

Maggie Perzyna  

The physical campus of the University of the Forest is a gathering place that serves more than 120 communities along several rivers in the Amazon. There are classes and exams that change with the seasons, teaching skills that benefit the community, like ethical hunting and fishing, harvesting, healing, singing and building.

Sharon Stein  

So, we want to flip the script, the usual script of educational aid, by which the global North offers education to the global South, which reproduces, you know, Eurocentrism and the sense that Western knowledge is the height of human progress and development. And they said, we're going to flip that script and say, actually, you know, there's things that we know that you all could really benefit from.

Maggie Perzyna  

The Huni Kui people are taught that they are not only guardians of the forest, but they are one with the forest. Everything, both visible and invisible, is entwined. And according to the University of the Forest, violence against the Amazon is an assault on the planet's metabolic body as a whole, and even our own bodies as extensions of the earth. 

Sharon Stein  

So, in collaboration with gesturing towards decolonial futures, we're developing this University of the Forest international digital campus, and so that's kind of what we're working on now. Developing pedagogies and practices that are inspired by the teachings of the forest and the community that holds them, but that are translated to what might be relevant to the context here in the global North.

Maggie Perzyna  

With help from The University of Victoria, the digital campus makes the University of the Forest an Open Access resource for anyone who would like to learn more about their teachings, their beliefs, or their five faculties, reverence, respect, reciprocity, responsibility and regeneration. Sharon explains that this approach isn't for everyone.

Sharon Stein  

It's actually about looking at the complexity of things, looking at our complicity in things, and that can be really uncomfortable. But people that are looking for something different said, you know, this allowed me to go to places where I didn't know were possible and and opens up other possibilities for them in their own context, as they think about the implications of their learning and unlearning for wherever they might find themselves. So, it's not a prescriptive approach, right? We don't just like describe the problem and then tell what people to do. We help people see the problem from different angles and perspectives, so that they can then approach it in different ways that they hadn't previously thought were possible.

Maggie Perzyna  

And despite its potential to create discomfort, Sharon says it seems like her students have been ready for a different way to learn, or rather, to unlearn. 

Sharon Stein  

We use this metaphor of a bus in your internal bus, what different passengers are activated by this stimulus, and what are you learning by observing these responses. And what I generally find with my students is that whether or not they've been thinking about some of these things before, they're actually really eager. You know, they really take up this invitation. 

Maggie Perzyna  

And according to Sharon, this is just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities to decentre the colonial systems that continue to create more inequality, more damage to the earth and more suffering from marginalized communities. And while these changes will be difficult, they'll benefit us in more ways than we can begin to understand. 

Sharon Stein  

Consensus is probably not going to be possible in our very polarized and cacophonous times, but is there a way where we can tune into each other and and center our responsibilities so that we can learn from repeated mistakes that have led us to this point and clear the space or compost so that we can create new soil for something else to be born, And that thing being born is not something we know yet, right? Like we have to allow it its own integrity. We can't smother it with our own projections, which is really hard, because the way we tend to think about the future in Western education is that we have to know exactly where we're going and exactly how we're going to get there. But what if we don't know, right? What if it's something emergent and that emerges with us as we move with it? Then what we would focus on is the quality of our relationships as we move towards something else, and the integrity of our learning in the process.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sharon Stein is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, and a founding member of the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures Collective. Many thanks to Sharon for sharing her insights on how decolonizing and decentring education can challenge colonial systems and inspire more sustainable, inclusive and equitable ways of knowing and being.  Joining me today are Peggy Levitt and Amin Moghadam. Peggy is the Chair of Sociology at Wellesley College and a leading voice on transnationalism, migration and globalization. She is also the co-founder of the Global (De)centre, a growing network of scholars from around the world who are working to break the hegemonic grasp of Western social theories and methods. Amin is the Cities and Migration Research Lead and head of the Francophone Research Network on Migration at CERC Migration, Toronto Metropolitan University. Amin's current research examines how migration to global cities intersects with housing politics, homemaking, and class formation. Thank you both for being here today. 

Amin Moghadam  

Thank you. 

Peggy Levitt  

Thank you for having us, Maggie.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, in North America, there's been a lot of academic discussion about decolonization, and there's no consensus on what that means. When the term is used in Europe, it has yet another meaning. Peggy is your use of the term decentring, and you've literally just written a book about this, a way to overcome these semantic differences, or is it a standalone concept?

Peggy Levitt

Well, first, thank you very much for having me and for the opportunity to talk with both of you today about these important issues. I think that whether you call the efforts to make knowledge production more inclusive, decolonizing or post-colonial or globalizing, they tend to stop at theory, and they tend to stop at diversifying content and perhaps people and I, I think that we are using the word decentring to go way beyond that. So, I think about this as both an epistemological project, but also as an ethical and a political project, because it's not enough to diversify content, and it's not enough to bring in more people, although those are important first steps. So, if you really want to achieve greater intellectual and cultural and economic and political equality around the world, we have to decentre ourselves. We have to decentre our ideas. We have to decentre the institutions where we work, and we have to decentre the infrastructures that connect those institutions. So, what do I mean by that? Decentring ourselves means really interrogating the prior assumptions that we bring to the table based on our positions. So, you know, what nation are we from, what race are we, what ethnicity, what gender, and how do those things bias or make us come to the table with certain assumptions about who is going to say what? How is it going to be said? How is it going to be responded to? And so, I think about this as a kind of intellectual equivalent to meditation. So, just as the meditator returns to the breath, so we around the seminar room table or in the research group or at the conference, have to really ask ourselves, are we listening? How are we listening? How are we responding and is it with an open mind and with an open heart, and what is the appropriate role that we each should play based on the resources we bring our seniority and our ability to bring certain resources to the table based on that. So, that's decentring ourselves. Decentring ideas is what we normally do, which is, you know, add more diverse content. Think about different ways of different categories for migration that exist in different parts of the world, but that also needs to go farther in the sense that there are large parts of the world where research isn't done. So, you can't write global art histories if you don't have local art histories, and you have to think about the ways that people have been trained and the universities that they come from, and the scholarly networks that they belong to that really narrow the focus of what comes into the body of knowledge that we draw upon. So, if everyone is moving to North America or Europe to study and studying the same theorists, then we have to decentre that knowledge base to begin with, and think about how it's narrowed, because we're only drawing from a certain group of scholars and a certain group of scholarship. So, by decentring institutions, I mean that in addition to the ideational and the personal changes that I'm talking about, we need to bring those things into the institutions where we work. So, whether we're working in a university or a museum or at a migration settlement agency, we need to bring that awareness and those practices and that openness into our work, and also try to change the structures of these institutions so that they do not have Western centrism in their DNA anymore, but begin to have a more open and inclusive approach to all kinds of ways of knowing and doing and being, and what the goals of those activities should be. And then what I mean by decentring infrastructures is to, the infrastructures are the pathways and routes that connect these institutions, and also to make those more unique, multi-directional that the amount and frequency and strength of what's flowing should be flowing, south-south, south-north, north-south, and all in between, so that we're not dependent upon passing through particular centers to get heard and to get to get included.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, it sounds like decentring involves a lot of personal introspection and a lot of reflection. Migration research often centers around Western perspectives and methodologies feeding what's been called the inequality pipeline. Amin what comes to mind when you think about decentring migration research? 

Amin Moghadam  

I would like to go back a little bit to your question about the local meanings that each word and terminology that we have, including post-colonial decentring, is a little bit less but I think that's not an issue. It's actually part of this interesting way of looking at decentring in a sense that, you know, the simplest word that we use, such as, let's say immigrant or Francophonie, for my part, because I work on Francophone immigration in Canada, they have very different meanings, right? Locally. And that's also, I think, to me, part of the efforts of decentring, our approach to actually understand the local meanings of the terminologies that we use globally in our institution. Now back to what Maggie just mentioned when we talk about decentring. It starts with identifying and defining what we mean by the center, right and why? Why is the center an issue? Peggy just mentioned it that you know, the center is associated with power, and the inequalities or discriminations that stem from the exercise of that power. So, decentring, to me means challenging power, this power that produces inequalities. With this framework, so we know migration studies has largely been consolidated in the global North with academic, non-academic institutions, fundings and also the interests of both public and private actors in this topic. So, the politicization is also very different depending on the context we're talking about. So, to me, decentring is also to ask ourselves how this knowledge is being used? To what end and for whom, basically? So, for my own research, what matters to me is highlighting, you know, the diversity, the complexity of life stories that we find in migration narratives, you know, making them more human, going beyond numbers and flows, but it's also about exposing, showing the mechanisms that tend to exploit individuals, whether in authoritarian countries or even liberal democracy, less as we see. So, decentring, for me, is primarily about the type of knowledge we produce and its purposes, which should stand apart from the interest of power, whether they be states or private actors. Now, what are our tools? Is it about expanding the geography of knowledge, of having people from different geographies? I would say yes and no. You know, as an Iranian migrant myself, I should say I was heavily shaped or formatted by the way migration is studied, first in France, as I moved to France, and then North American University. So, it's not because I'm Iranian or because I'm queer or because I come from a Muslim background that I will automatically decentre migration studies, but I think that there are resources that, you know, reflections that we can have over our own trajectories. Peggy was talking about the relationship that we have with ourselves, you know, asking constantly the question of, "Why am I actually studying this topic, and who am I to study this?" You know, I think it's a very important question, like the reason why we are studying a topic. So, acknowledging our positionality as researchers is important, but I see positionality more in terms of the questions I as a researcher ask myself, why I study a particular subject? The other issue, I think, and Peggy mentioned that it's the importance of local histories, you know, and understanding them, I think that's one of the issues that we have now a little bit but in migration studies that I feel it is a little bit disconnected from the historical depth of these issues in each context.

Magdalena Perzyna  

I like the way you framed the center with power. I think that's really important. So, let's circle back a little bit Peggy, what led to the creation of the Global (De)Center? 

Peggy Levitt  

Very much to address these different issues. I think that when we talk about international research, it's often really just North American and European scholars. When we talk about interdisciplinarity, it's often just social scientists or humanists, but not social scientists, humanists and physical scientists together. When we talk about decolonizing or critical efforts, we often stop at critique and don't chart a positive way forward. In other words, we're very, very good at criticizing and saying what's wrong and not very good at saying what we should do about it, and we often do our work with ego and competition and individualism rather than humility and collaboration and empowering each other. And so, the Global (De)Centre is a network of people who are not just committed to decentring knowledge production and its dissemination and how we teach about it and how we act upon it, also committed to doing that with a different kind of professional ethos. Claudio Pinheiro and I have written about this as a ‘Southern attitude’. A Southern attitude isn't a geography, it is a commitment to working in a different way. And it's that individual change, but it's also how that individual change translates into institutional change and more political change. So, that is what we're about, and it's hard to, I think some of the challenges that we faced have been around how really difficult it is to bring colleagues in from other parts of the world. Not only because, you know, they don't have money to travel. It's just hard to identify people beyond the ones who are known internationally, because most of the time they've studied abroad. So, when you think about it, say you are interested in learning more about approaches in different African countries to migration studies. Well, we can all probably think of scholars from South Africa, from Ghana, from Nigeria. We maybe can't think of people from Botswana or Mozambique. So, that's part of the inequality pipeline, and that's part of decentring. Going beyond the people that are, take the theorists who are always trotted out to sort of diversify. Because there are many, many more important thinkers out there. There are many more young people coming out there. So, part of our effort is to create networks with those folks and figure out ways to bring them in so we have a truly more diverse and inclusive set of ideas and people and ways of doing things that are entering into the pipeline, so that you disrupt it more effectively from the very beginning.

Maggie Perzyna  

Very interesting. So, what I'm hearing is that, rather than just being diagnostic, decentring is really active as well.

Peggy Levitt  

Absolutely. I mean, I feel like we're so good at saying what's wrong, and so many theorists are brilliant at diagnosing the legacy of coloniality, but we talk about decolonizing decoloniality, because that means recognizing that it does not mean the same thing everywhere, and that we need to operationalize a toolkit of what we would do about it, instead of just studying it. This is an effort to operationalize the toolkit.

Amin Moghadam  

What Peggy mentioned about dissemination of knowledge, because, you know, when we talk about knowledge production, obviously, we think about the different phases, you know, like we talk about our positionality, we talk about, you know, our methods. But also, there is the issue of how we disseminate the knowledge that we produce. And I think that's also part of this unequal system. The infrastructure that Peggy just mentioned, you know, kind of confines us with limited tools. You know, with dominate languages, let's say English, and then to a lower, lesser extent, French. Journals, for instance, in this field, that somehow dictate how migration is written about. And I think decentring also involves questioning these platforms for knowledge dissemination. You know, as researchers, we are in academia. So, we are in institutions. Constantly, we have to engage in a process of professionalization. Being professionals of our own field. And this professionalization is judged also by our ability to publish and disseminate knowledge within these recognized platforms of knowledge dissemination. So, despite sometimes all our good intentions, if I as a researcher constantly have to adapt to the frameworks imposed by Northern American, let's say, journals, to gain visibility. Or if I'm always focused on metrics like clicks and views, I believe very quickly, I have to move away from the original goals of my commitment to decentre the field. So, there are very structural issues that I think by decentring also, we have to work on these platforms of knowledge dissemination. Amin, in your view, how can scholars from different regions, especially from the global South, collaborate to create a more inclusive understanding of migration? I would like to, again, you know, emphasize the complexity of local and regional histories, and how they inform migration and production of knowledge on migration. You know, migration are not separate from the rest of society, you know. And each society has a very long history, you know, and very complex. So, one of the general problems, I would say, in universities, is that in general disciplines, and that's not just for migration studies or, you know, different fields of studies, especially new ones, are very concerned with delineating their boundaries, you know, to gain legitimacy, that's how they can say this is migration studies. But I believe this is also the case, you know, the reason why sometimes migration studies are disconnected from more historical and complexity of local situations. And the reason why we need people from the global South is, simply put, because individuals' lived experiences influence the way they perceive a phenomenon. And we need to intersect these experiences to enrich the debate on migration. For instance, the issue of languages is very, very interesting. You know, like we talk about migration, we use certain words in English, but the same word, the way we translate it into another language, let's say Arabic, for instance, it doesn't have the same meaning. And the reason why it doesn't have the same meaning, it's because it has a very different history. And so, the question of translation between languages that are dominant, such as English and French and the so called more marginal languages, it's a very interesting issue. Because behind the language, there is the spirit of a language, and I can see coming also from the French perspective, because for them, there is also another center, even if you might consider that French is a dominant language, which is and for them, the center that is producing inequalities is English. And it's just, you know, and next week, it's the big conference of Francophonie in France. I was just listening to something on the radio and the head of this conference was saying by Francophonie, we are aiming to propose an "anti-Monde", anti-world model. So, they consider that French can be used to propose a different region of the world. So, it's interesting how each, you know, context considers a different center to itself. 

Peggy Levitt  

Yeah, I think Amin made a really important point about the platforms of knowledge dissemination. I feel like that's a really important and sort of under considered part of the inequality pipeline, whether it's about the language that you write in, or the impact factors, or the whole Open Access publishing industry, which really redistributes the burden of the cost. Just redistributes it between the author and the reader, but never to the actual publishing company themselves. So, I think the point here is that everyone is able to participate in the decentring project in a different way at a different stage in their life. So, Amin's totally right that as a young scholar, you have to follow these rules. I wish that wasn't true, but you do. And as you get older and have, hopefully a more stable employment, or perhaps tenure, you're able to write in ways that challenge the status quo more effectively. So, I think it's really important to keep that in mind and invite people to the table to participate in the ways that they can at their different stages in the life cycle. 

Maggie Perzyna  

That's a lot of responsibility for the old guard [laughs]. 

Peggy Levitt

Well, I think we I think older people need to take that responsibility, because we have more resources and freedom, and that's part of the generosity that I'm talking about. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Peggy, can you tell us about some of your recent projects. How does decentry look in practice? 

Peggy Levitt  

Well, some of you know that I've moved towards the relationship between migrating people and migrating culture. And the book that you mentioned, I finished the draft. I have not finished the book, is a book about the cultural and intellectual inequality pipeline. And so, it focuses on art history and comparative literature scholarship. But I don't believe that we can decentre migration scholarship without decentring scholarship in general. So, in the Global (De)center, we do have a migration working group that is doing some projects that speak to this. So, one is an analysis of syllabi from around the world that looks at what words are used, how are they used, what topics are not used, who's being taught around the world, who's not being taught? To try to really empirically study that inequality in the way migration scholarship is being produced and disseminated. Another project we have, which is an aspirational project and is going to take us a long time to be able to put in place, is to create a global social thinking repository, which is some kind of platform that would showcase thinking, pedagogical practices, popular culture and exemplary educational efforts from around the world that attempts to go beyond the thinkers that are trotted out, as I said, from specific parts of the world. So, for example, when I look at scholarship from the Arab speaking world, Ibn Khaldun is always one of the social theorists that's brought up. Well, there are many, many people besides Ibn Khaldun. I'm glad to know about Ibn Khaldun, but I'd like to know about many, many other people. So, the idea is to create a community of scholars from underrepresented regions who would help us collect and collate and curate and make accessible global social thinking. And I'm saying thinking, because we think that novelists and artists are also social theorists, in the sense that they have theories about social relations. So, Abdulrazak Gurnaha, who's a novelist, Tanzanian novelist of colonialism in Africa, has a theory about colonialism in his work. So, this is another project that we're trying to do. And in the field work that I did for the book, I met amazing people who are doing decentring work. And in fact, the book includes examples in every chapter of some of these kinds of efforts. So, a lot of what these people are doing is trying to create South-South networks that, either eventually get them to the center. So, there are a lot of artists and writers who still want to make it in London or Paris or New York. But for many people, the whole idea is to circumvent those traditional centers and to create new nodes and new pathways and ‘new’ new centers, for lack of a better word, that do not depend upon passing through Europe and North America to circulate widely, globally. And so, those are things that are very inspiring, and also things that many of us do not pay attention to because we're not looking. But that kind of work is well underway and is changing. It's changing the way knowledge and art and culture are produced and disseminated, even if some of us are not happy about it.

Maggie Perzyna  

Amin same question for you, how do you think of decentring in your work on transnational housing? 

Amin Moghadam  

On transnational housing, I would start with exactly the transnational aspects of it. In the sense that, you know, I'm trying to look into housing policies in the Canadian context, and the way they intersect with individual trajectories. And the way I look at the decision of becoming a homeowner in Toronto for the Iranian community, is to, you know, trace the formation of capital for the, you know, middle class and upper-class families back in Iran up to the moment where decide to invest it in the Torontonian real estate market. And, you know, their own rationalities. Why do they decide to become homeowners? At which stage of their life and which stage of their migration trajectory? And to me, from, I would say, more epistemological point of view is, you know, looking at the way capital also from that is the result of the labor and you know, or family, you know, stories, is also being used, to some extent, extracted by housing and immigration policies in the Canadian context. And what's the impact of that on on immigrants? So, it's again, looking at really power dynamics. And, you know, I think the issue of housing is, you know, is crucial in the Canadian context, and the political responses that we bring to the current issue of housing are very limited, as we can see. Like instead of going deep into the history of housing since the Second World War in Canada, we try to limit the number of, for instance, international students, which is a very limited, I would say, tactical response, a political response to the issue. But it's not, you know, the actual - it doesn't tackle deeper political, historical dimension of that. The other project I would like to mention here is a new project that I have the pleasure to work on with Professor Nima Naghibi at the English department at TMU [Toronto Metropolitan University]. It's called 'Tehranto' - so, you know the Iranians, they call Toronto 'Tehranto' given the big size of the Iranian community here - stories of belonging and home making of Iranian immigrants in Toronto. And in this project, we decided to, we know that it's a very fragmented diaspora, given the political past and present of the Iranian community. So, we really decided to give visibility to the members of the Iranian community, and to not that much intervene in the way they want to talk about their stories. And one of the examples with this call that we issued to the Iranian community here to talk about their stories of coming to Toronto and to talk about different places of the city of Toronto, but also to talk about their life stories and the experience of having them just talking, without giving them necessarily, instructions on how they have to write and they are not academics, was very interesting because it created this - so, you know, they submitted their papers - we didn't select them. We accepted as they were, and they came to an event that we organized, and they read their own stories. And that created the spaces where, first of all, us as immigrants and researchers, we expose our own vulnerabilities. We told them who we are. You know, I opened up to an audience of, I don't know, 70 people talking about myself, who I am, why I'm here, and you know, by the story that I told them, and that was the first time that I was talking about my different identities, let's say, in public. And Nima did the same, and it created that space for them also to talk to the point that after the two sessions, just to give you an example, we kept receiving messages from the Iranian community, asking us to organize again, another session, because it helped them to reflect on their own trajectory. So, that's, I think, and we are hoping to, you know, to move forward with this kind of methodologies too. And our plan, for instance, with these papers, is to just publish an anthology of these papers without having maybe an introduction, but without touching them, or without necessarily editing them or asking the authors to change it based on our own for instance, let's say guideline.

Peggy Levitt  

I think that the projects that Amin and I are both talking about are one kind of change. And I would like to offer that we think even more boldly about different kinds of social change. So, the way I think about this, and I'm taking this from, it's a collective based in Canada that incorporates Indigenous communities in Central and North and South America. And they talk about soft reform, hard reform, and beyond reform. And I want to push us to imagine beyond reform. So, a lot of the things that we normally talk about are soft reform. So, that's diversifying the content, the people, how we do our research. Hard reform is trying to bring about fundamental change, but within the institutional structure as it exists. So, the university stays organized as it is, the migration field stays organized as it is. But we should also think about beyond reform, which is imagining and trying to create new ways of creating knowledge, of sharing knowledge, of taking care of knowledge. So, here I'm thinking about, are there different kinds of spaces of learning that don't look like universities. Are there different kinds of ways of displaying that don't look like museums that are ‘unmuseums’? Are there different ways of classifying and caring for knowledge that aren't organized like the libraries of today? Because each of those institutions are inherently not decentred, and are inherently Western-centric, and so repeat the same problems no matter how much you try to change them. In a sense, because those problems are in their DNA. And we don't think boldly like that. We don't think about - it's really, really hard to think about what a place of learning that isn't structured like a Western institution looks like. And I think that we need to engage in pro-figurative politics; that is imagining a better world so you can create it. And we shouldn't be afraid to dream and to put that out there, no matter how unrealistic it sounds, because otherwise, we're always going to be stuck repeating some of the same mistakes, and it's up to us as scholars and creators of culture and ideas to lead that forward.

Maggie Perzyna  

Amin, we live in a world where migration is a highly politicized and contested issue. Very briefly to conclude, how does decentring migration research move the needle on how we conduct research? 

Amin Moghadam  

Well, I think it is because, precisely because the topic of migration so politicized that it comes kind of back to our approaches to propose different perspectives on migration and trying to understand, you know, in the European context, but also to some extent here in Canada, we just researchers, even within these very conventional institutions, the way they produce knowledge. They are not able to communicate very simple facts about migration in the European societies because it is so politicized. It's so politicized that certain narratives just don't reach any audience in the society. And for instance, in France, it's the politicization of migration and the way it is embedded within electoral politics has created that situation where it's almost impossible. So, as Peggy has just mentioned, maybe creating other institutions, other places where we talk about migration and also would help with this situation, but also acknowledging, I think, the fact that there are many actors, there have been many artists in the past who've done great works, that today we would qualify as decentred. And I think it's also our responsibility to give visibility to those who are doing a lot of work, and I think that's part of decentring, and it's different, and they are not within these institutions. And for those, you know, among us who are within this institution, it's also, as you mentioned, our responsibility to use our power of being within institution to give visibility to realities that are not, that don't gain visibility. You know, that's sorry for just I repeated visibility many times, but I think it's a very important thing to consider. It's not just about it's also about what happened in the past and how we can recognize what happened in the past as decentred. 

Maggie Perzyna 

Peggy, last word?

Peggy Levitt  

I published a book in 2023 with three colleagues on transnational social protection. And in that book, at the end, we argue that, you know, it's a moral responsibility for societies to take care of the people that are taking care of our society. So, what would our societies look like without the nannies and elder care workers that are caring for us? And so, we need to talk about that moral responsibility. I know it's fraught. I know this is a highly xenophobic, nationalistic moment, but we need to speak truth to power. And when I think about the people that inspire me and who I would like to emulate in my own small way, it's people who spoke to that moral imperative and who spoke to that imperative of a cared for humanity. A society that takes care of everyone, that everyone has basic dignity. And I think we need to keep saying that, no matter how idealistic, and you know you need to have hope, and you need to keep spreading that vision of a better world.

Maggie Perzyna 

Well, I'm definitely inspired. Thank you both so much for this wonderful conversation.

Peggy Levitt  

Thank you for having us. It was great. Thank you, Maggie,

Maggie Perzyna  

Thanks to Peggy and Amin for joining me today and thank you for listening. This is a CERC Migration podcast produced in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe to Borders & Belonging on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on decentring, please visit the show notes. Do you want to share your thoughts or additional research on decentring migration studies? We'd love to hear from you. Follow the Borders & Belonging LinkedIn page and be part of the conversation. I'm Maggie Perzyna, thanks for listening.