Title: Professor of Migration, Director of SCMR, Editor-in-Chief JEMS
What areas of migration are you most interested in?
My editorial work on the journal brings me in contact with a full range of issues, topics, regions in the migration and ethnic relations field as well as across the disciplines. This keeps me on my toes and up to date on trends and directions and I confess to having broad interests, as well as liking both qualitative and quantitative approaches. My own intellectual journey started out looking at contested citizenship in a comparative way across Europe. Over the last decade I have researched Islam and Muslims in Europe, using large quantitative data-sets across six countries, as well as conducting qualitative biographical research on the lives of Thai women and Transgender people who hook up with Westerners in search of a better life. So, I guess I’m broadly interested in everything.
List three of your most significant publications relating to migration
Statham, P. (2020). Living the long-term consequences of Thai-Western marriage migration: The radical life-course transformations of women who partner older Westerners. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(8), 1562–1587. DOI link to paper.
Statham, P. (2024). Challenging the Muslimification of Muslims in research on ‘liberal democratic values’: why culture matters beyond religion. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 50(1), 203–232. DOI link to paper.
Koopmans, R. and Statham, P. (1999). ‘Challenging the Liberal Nation-State? Postnationalism, Multiculturalism, and the Collective Claims Making of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Britain and Germany.’ American Journal of Sociology 105(3): 652-696. DOI link to paper.
Do you have a particular regional or national focus to your work on migration?
Yes, I set up the Sussex Mahidol Migration Partnership with colleagues at the Mahidol Migration Center at the IPSR and RILCA, Mahidol University, Thailand. This has led to a number of collaborative research projects, and a PhD, so far, and it has been exciting for me to learn and write about a pivotal country in SE Asia and the Global South, alongside Thai colleagues. Prior to this most of my research had been focused on European countries, especially the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, as well as the EU.
In recent years, I have also rekindled an interest in perspectives on integration and assimilation and how these can differ in Europe and the US, partly through collaborating on a volume dedicated to Richard Alba – see Statham, P., & Foner, N. (2024). 'Assimilation and integration in the twenty-first century: where have we been and where are we going?' Introduction to a special issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, in honour of Richard Alba. DOI link to paper.
Email: paul.statham@sussex.ac.uk
A 'word cloud' made of answers to the question "what areas of migration are you most interested in", asked of SCMR researchers in 2021. Dominant words include migration, transnational, mobility, work, integration, diaspora, forced, policy, Europe, Africa, and Asia.