Meeting reports from consultations held with academics, researchers, policy actors, artists, and migrant rights advocates. Discussions covered issues related to the state of migration studies, gaps in the field, pathways to equitable research partnerships, links between researchers and artists, and pathways to impact. Meetings were held in Barcelona, Beirut, Brussels, Delhi, Glasgow, London, Medellín, Nairobi, New York and Thessaloniki.More than 1 billion people are estimated to be migrants, living either inside or outside their country of birth. Migration challenges currently feature centrally in electoral politics in the UK, and indeed across Europe and North America. They underlie considerations about foreign policy, national and international security, and international humanitarian and development aid. Understanding the drivers, dynamics and impacts of migration in the contemporary world requires a broad-based and interdisciplinary approach which is cognizant of the increasingly complex and multi-scalar drivers and experiences of migration. Despite this, migration studies has suffered from a prolonged Balkanisation with academic and policy makers largely failing to step across disciplinary, theoretical, methodological and geographical divides to learn from one another (Hathaway 2007; Faist 2011, Perez 2017). There is also a lack of systematic understanding of the ways in which research can effectively be linked to, inform, and influence policy and practice to bring about positive results that could help facilitate safe and constructive decisions about migration, inform more positive experiences of movement, and lead to the creation of viable alternatives for those who would prefer not to move. Researchers and practitioners face challenges in developing research tools and policy instruments that reflect a field in which the central features (economic and political dynamics, migratory routes, costs of travel, policy and legal environments in transit and destination areas) are all constantly shifting. There is also a need to take stock of the tools for achieving impact that have been shown to be effective and to identify new ways of generating impact through closer collaboration and communication between researchers, policy-makers and practitioners. This project will use an inclusive, consultative approach to assessing the scope, achievements and challenges of the existing portfolio of ESRC and AHRC funded research to identify strategic opportunities and priorities for further research and to highlight best practice in the area of impact. Drawing on the extensive interdisciplinary expertise of scholars within the London International Development Centre, the Migration Leadership Team will engage in a series of workshops, one-on-one interviews, and panel discussions with researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, migrants associations and arts organisations to identify areas of research to prioritise, pathways to impact that have been, or are likely to be, promising, and platforms for communication and collaboration that are likely to help bridge research, policy, and public engagement. We have identified a series of key themes that we will include in our enquiry: 1) How can migration studies and refugee studies more effectively benefit from the theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that each is making? 2) How can research and policy better respond to the continued movement of people into and across the European Union, and between Europe and the UK? 3) How can research be used to better understand political and economic crises in countries and regions of origin and how can this research inform policy and practice? 4) What does emerging evidence tell us about the effectiveness of migration management and development policy which increasingly focuses on regions of origin? 5) What improvements and methodological innovations can be made in the collection and compiling of data about migration trends and demographics to improve the quality of information that drives migration and development policy? Our main output will be a recommended strategy for the ESRC and AHRC for supporting migration research, supplemented by a scoping study on existing research, an interactive decision support tool, 8 policy briefs and 2 journal articles on our methodological approach. We will use visual tools (e.g. comics) to enhance impact.

The LIDC-MLT employed an inclusive, consultative approach to assessing the scope, achievements and challenges of the existing portfolio of ESRC, AHRC and other funded migration-related research. Further, it sought to identify strategic opportunities and priorities for further research and to highlight best practice in the area of impact. This was not a conventional research project, in that the award from ESRC was to conduct a strategic review of the state of migration and displacement studies rather than to carry out a research project. 'Data' consisted of feedback provided from a series of ten 'Global Migration Conversations' - meetings attended by 30-50 people each, held in 10 different cities on five continents. In total, more than 450 people participated in the conversations. Participants in the conversations included migration studies academics, policy makers, refugee assistance providers, artists, museum curators, refugees and migrants. Sample selection was intended to include as wide a range as possible from these stakeholder groups, in order to inform the setting of strategic priorities for the ESRC and AHRC. In each conversation, participants were asked three key questions: 1. What are the gaps and priorities in migration research? 2. How can we build and strengthen effective international and interdisciplinary partnerships for migration research? 3. How can we bridge the divide between migration research, practice and policy? Data was recorded from the feedback from the individual conversations and 'field reports' consist of reports published on our website on each of the different conversations.