1st Edition
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.
Introduction – Computational approaches to migration and integration research: promises and challenges
Lucas G. Drouhot, Emanuel Deutschmann, Carolina V. Zuccotti and Emilio Zagheni
Part I: Migration Dynamics
1. Predictive modeling of movements of refugees and internally displaced people: towards a computational framework
Katherine Hoffmann Pham and Miguel Luengo-Oroz
2. Migration networks and the intensity of global migration flows, 1990-2015
Diego F. Leal and Nicolas L. Harder
3. How to model the weather-migration link: a machine-learning approach to variable selection in the Mexico-U.S. context
Mario D. Molina, Nancy Chau, Amanda D. Rodewald and Filiz Garip
Part II: Integration and Intergroup Relations
4. Analyzing community reaction to refugees through text analysis of social media data
Claire Kelling and Burt L. Monroe
5. Catalyst of hate? Ethnic insulting on YouTube in the aftermath of terror attacks in France, Germany and the United Kingdom 2014-2017
Christian Czymara, Stephan Dochow-Sonderhaus, Lucas G. Drouhot, Müge Simsek and Christoph Spörlein
6. Exploring the dynamics of neighborhood ethnic segregation with agent-based modelling: an empirical application to Bradford, UK
Carolina V. Zuccotti, Jan Lorenz, Rocco Paolillo, Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez and Selamawit Serka
7. Did exposure to asylum seeking migration affect the electoral outcome of the ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ in Berlin? Evidence from the 2019 European elections.
Andrea Petracchin, Lorenzo Gabrielli, Jisu Kim, Sarah Ludwig-Dehm and Steffen Pötzschke
Biography
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.
