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Changing Surroundings and Gender: Gendered Experiences and Gender-Sensitive Support in Migration Contexts

This special issue explores the interrelation between changing surroundings and gender in the context of migration. Gender influences mobilities and drives migration patterns, experiences and expectations. Gender-specific needs and assets may arise in the process of displacement and resettlement, urging these contexts to question the space available for negotiating and practicing gender.

Changing surroundings challenge migrants to engage in processes of revisiting and often reshaping their gender identities, roles and relations, in accordance with or contending against the contextual hegemonic ideals, norms, attributes, expectations, attitudes, and practices to gender.

By inquiring this complex interrelation between context and gender, this special issue seeks to advance the understanding of how gender-sensitive and – responsive systems of support can be developed in contexts of migration.

This special issue invites researchers to submit original theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions on gender in contexts of displacement and migration, from multiple disciplines and interdisciplinary perspectives. Prospective contributions address topics like the following but are not limited to:

• Gendered experiences of displacement, resettlement, local integration and repatriation;
• Sense making of gender in contexts of transnational transition;
• The (re-)construction of the spatial and social settings, practices and beliefs that define lived experiences of gender in migrants;
• Strategies used to negotiate masculinities and femininities amidst changing surroundings;
• Ways in which informal and formal responses to (forced) migration influence gender identities, roles and relations;
• Socio-political developments in migration policy and programming that influence gender experiences of migrants;
• Struggles with hegemonic ideals, normativity, nonconformity, new possibilities for migrant women and men;
• Gendered resistance to systems of oppression and violence in public and private modes of care;
• The role of traditional demarcations of gender roles in regard to the reordering of lived citizenship by migrants;
• Developing gender-sensitive policies and support systems for migrants;
• Changes in (traditional) social systems and the reconfiguration of strictly binary notions of gender or gendered divisions in families, in labor, in communities;
• etc.

DiGeSt is an interdisciplinary and international journal and accepts papers from authors working from all disciplinary backgrounds; including (though not limited to) gender and diversity studies, sociology, anthropology, empirical ethics, bioethics, feminist studies, psychology, political sciences and history. For more information contact the editors, Dr Ladan Rahbari & Dr Tina Goethals.

This special issue is edited by guest editors Dr Sofie Vindevogel & Fien Van Wolvelaer.

Submission of abstracts

Please submit your abstracts (max 250 words) by April 1, 2020 only by email to guest editor Sofie Vindevogel (email: Sofie.Vindevogel@hogent.be).

Communication on selected abstracts and invitation of full papers can be expected by May, 2020. Full papers are to be submitted for peer review by January 1, 2021.

Please consult the submission guidelines for style and formatting: https://www.digest.ugent.be/about/submissions