Computational Research in Ethnic and Migration Studies

This book showcases the potential of computational approaches for research questions at the heart of migration and integration research via a set of original, cutting-edge empirical studies by a diverse, international team of authors.

Why do people emigrate? Do weather conditions and climate change affect decisions to migrate? How do migration networks evolve on a global scale? Can we predict refugee movements? How do host communities respond to the influx of refugees? Do right-wing populist parties get stronger where lots of refugees are located? Do terror attacks lead to more hostility towards immigrants? What mechanisms explain neighborhood ethnic segregation? The collection of studies in this book harnesses the power of an emerging interdisciplinary research field known as computational social science to shed new light on such classic questions of migration and integration research. The cutting-edge empirical studies use a wide range of computational approaches, from agent-based modeling and network analysis to machine learning, natural language processing, and advanced spatial methods and cover detailed spatial, textual, and network data from both online and offline sources. The book thus demonstrates the potential of computational approaches for migration and integration research, while also discussing the challenges that arise in this emerging field.

This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, students of sociology, ethnic and migration studies, international politics, and computational social science. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Emanuel Deutschmann is an Assistant Professor of Sociological Theory at Europa-Universität Flensburg, an Associate at the European University Institute’s Migration Policy Centre, and the author of “Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate across Borders, and Why It Matters” (2022).

Lucas G. Drouhot is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utrecht University (Netherlands). His core research agenda focuses on immigrant incorporation in Western liberal societies. His past work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, and International Migration Review among other outlets.

Carolina V. Zuccotti is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and Visiting Professor at University Carlos III de Madrid (Spain). She specializes in migration, ethnicity, social inequality, and urban studies. Her work has been published in journals like Sociology, International Migration Review, Population, Space and Place, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Emilio Zagheni is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He is best known for his pioneering work on using Web and social media data for studying migration processes and for his role in developing the field of Digital and Computational Demography.