Doctoral research, migration and belonging, institutional ethnography
Northumbria University (PhD) & The Geographical Journal, 2018–2025
Context
Between 2018 and 2022, I conducted nearly two years of institutional ethnography and participatory action research with organisations supporting migrants in northeast England. My fieldwork unfolded across two sites. The first focused on the inner workings of a charitable organisation, examining the gap between institutional aspiration and everyday practice in the voluntary sector; this work underpins my forthcoming paper in Cultural Geographies on institutional failure and the conditions that produce it.
The second began in 2019 in a community garden, toiling the earth alongside a group of women seeking asylum, where it became clear that the expectations of legibility and conventional academic discourse could not do justice to what was actually happening between bodies, soil, and the infrastructures of care that held the group together. It was in that second site that the concept of regrounding emerged, and it became the conceptual argument of my thesis. To write about migration is often to make people legible to systems that strip them of self-determination; to translate is often to turn dynamic lives into flat narratives of displacement. This ever-unfolding research is a response to that problem. It asks what happens if we approach belonging through material practice and affective attunement, rather than through legal status or inclusion.
Approach
My doctoral research combined institutional ethnography of cultural integration/inclusion programmes in northeast England with participatory fieldwork alongside migrant-led and migrant-supporting organisations. Methodologically, I combined institutional ethnography with participatory fieldwork, and in later work developed a geopoetic approach that takes the everyday material practices of migration, food, soil, shared rituals, as ways into non-sovereign belonging. I drew on Édouard Glissant, Lauren Berlant, and Aya Nassar. I’m holding these alongside my own experience as a researcher-migrant whose positionality shaped both access and interpretation.
The empirical chapters are built around three lively forms (tea, soil, seeds), each opening a different register of attachment: feminist-material solidarity, common infrastructure, and decolonised attachment.
Output
- Glitches, geopoetics, and the matter of migration: Regrounding beyond citizenship, The Geographical Journal, 192(1), 2026. [DOI]
- Through the alluring mirage of citizenship, introduction to Special Section of The Geographical Journal, co-authored with John Clayton, 2026.
- PhD thesis, Northumbria University, 2022. Available on request.
- Related essay: On reading non-participation as refusal, Fennia: International Journal of Geography, 2023.
Contribution
The work introduces regrounding as a socio-geographic concept, and as an alternative to citizenship-based frameworks of belonging. Rather than seeking inclusion within existing national structures, regrounding describes forms of attachment that emerge through material practice, shared infrastructure, and decolonised relationships to place. It names how justice can be composed in shared gestures, outside formal recognition.
For migration scholarship, this offers a working alternative to both integration/inclusion frameworks and critiques of citizenship that remain bound to the legal category they critique. For the voluntary and community sector, which I worked with directly throughout the research, it suggests that alternative models of engagement are possible even within the sector’s structural constraints.
I am currently co-editing the Geographical Journal Special Section in which this paper appears, extending the argument into a broader conversation about what lies beyond citizenship as an organising frame.
Collaborators and interlocutors
Dr John Clayton (doctoral supervisor and special issue co-editor, Northumbria University); the organisations and participants whose names appear in anonymised form in the thesis; co-contributors to the Special Section including Taraf Abu Hamdan and Olivia Mason, Joanna Allen and Moiti Mohamed Azrouk, and others.
Interested in commissioning research on migration, belonging, or place-based attachment? Get in touch.
Kahina Meziant 