MEMO Americas: Community Partners & Academics

The meeting had the purpose of discussing fieldwork for the project among academic and non-academic partners. In the region of the Americas, fieldwork will take place in the following places:

• Canada
• Border between Mexico and the United States, Mexico’s southern border, and Mexico City
• Guatemala
• El Salvador

The main purpose of the fieldwork will be to identify different migratory trajectories and people, as well as the diverse drivers that have led to their migration. As there are three migratory systems in the project (Americas, Southeast Asia, and Western Africa), the idea is to be able to compare not only within systems but across them. With this in mind, project coordinators are seeking to design an homogeneous process of interview, transcription and coding that facilitates comparisons. 

The project is currently under review by the Ethics Board at TMU, and when this process concludes, we will need to clear the process at other institutions, so fieldwork can start afterwards. Anna Triandafyllidou shared that the process is moving along and probably fieldwork may start soon.