Reflections

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly called upon to advance our understanding of, or provide solutions for, global challenges. However, multiple variants of the concept of interdisciplinarity exist (intra-, multi-, pluri, trans-, cross disciplinary).

While interdisciplinarity is often used as a generic concept which includes all research by teams or individuals that combine, integrate or transcend parts of two or more disciplines, it also refers to a systematic effort of mutual interaction. Different ways of engaging across disciplines to address migration-related research questions offer distinct benefits and challenges.  

Interdisciplinary encounters between law and anthropology often expose considerable theoretical, epistemological and methodological differences.

In this section, we invite our collaborators and contributors to reflect on past experiences derived from collaborations across the disciplines, and/or attempts by legal scholars on incorporating methods/drawing on knowledge from anthropology and vice versa.

We ask: how can such intellectual crossing be productive? How can we best create a research design related to migration in which legal and ethnographic findings feed each other in a coherent way? How can we construct research questions in a way that combines legal and ethnographic approaches and is likely to speak to both scientific communities?