Editorial welcome 2024

Welcome to the first issue of 2024!

This year JEMS is officially 50! We are starting the 50th volume of the journal today known as the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. The journal’s first iteration Community (1971), as it was called, was a vehicle for the British race equality institutions. Then, as New Community (1972–1997), the lens became more academic and migrant experience focussed. Although a pioneer of research that brought other European countries and their immigration and ethnic relations experiences into view, the subject matter was viewed mostly from a UK perspective, in line with the nation-centric thinking of the time. Later the journal was detached from the UK race industry and personally owned. In this period, it underwent a further metamorphosis when a collaboration with the University of Sussex established the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in 1998. In this era, JEMS was at the forefront of the Europeanisation of scholarship that transformed understandings of migration and ethnic relations by advancing comparative European understandings as well as perspectives thinking beyond nation-state centrism. Finally, the latest stage of the JEMS journey started when the publisher Taylor and Francis acquired the journal outright and I was asked to be Editor a decade ago. This latest period has witnessed a massive expansion and radical transformation of the migration and ethnic relations field, reflecting a world changed by globalisation processes, of which migration is a key driver and output. Migration has moved from the periphery to the core of social scientific inquiry. At JEMS, we have intentionally and strategically tried to play a part in supporting the opening and global broadening of the academic discussion.Part of this has included making purposeful efforts so that thinking on international migration and its consequences extends beyond the hegemonic European and North American scholarships. There are clear limits to what a journal can achieve given the structural inequalities in opportunities for knowledge production and scholarship across the globe. Still, we continue trying and there are significant increases in engagement in JEMS from scholars in China, Turkey, and India, in particular, while progress is evident from Latin America, SE Asia, and Africa too. According to submission and publication statistics JEMS is importantly globalising relative to other comparable journals.

Today, JEMS is a broad church and a big one – the scale is massive. In 2023, we published 5321 pages of peer reviewed scholarship across 20 issues. Importantly, JEMS does a lot of the heavy lifting for published scholarship in our field, as well as being the forum that also links across to mainstream disciplinary debates. Overall, the profile of JEMS as a high-ranking journal is an indicator for the robust health of migration scholarship. So, while we are not actually sure if JEMS is 50 (according to issue) or 53 (according to date), what matters is that the journal retains the same forward-looking spirit as always. At each stage in its life-span the journal has provided an infrastructure that has served as a vital forum for advancing knowledge and critical debates, while keeping a sense of community and identity among migration and ethnicity scholars.

The global span of JEMS today is demonstrated by the last issue of 2023 and the first of 2024. 2023 ends with a Special Issue entitled, COVID-19 return migration phenomena: experiences from South and Southeast Asia, comprised of nine articles by scholars writing about this world-regional experience – see introduction (Rajan and Arcand 2023). Then 2024 opens with a Special Issue of scholarship on contemporary assimilation and integration perspectives in the US and Europe that has been produced as a tribute to Richard Alba to mark his formal retirement as well as serve as a first output to celebrate JEMS reaching 50 – see introduction, Assimilation and Integration in the Twenty-First Century: Where have we been and where are we going? Introduction to a Special Issue in honour of Richard Alba (Statham and Foner 2024). This collection brings together a group of scholars from the US and Europe whose scholarship has contributed to the broad related assimilation and integration perspectives that have been significantly shaped by Alba. The contributions offer critical reflections, substantive research, and insights on possible ways forward: see Alba (2024), Crul (2024), Foner (2024), Kalter and Foroutan (2024), Kasinitz and Waters (2024), Klarenbeek (2024), Lee and Sheng (2024), Safi (2024), Starr and Freeland (2024), Statham (2024), and Zhang and Abascal (2024). In addition, we publish an interview with Richard Alba, where he recounts the life and career experiences that have shaped his intellectual thinking (Alba, Statham, and Foner 2024). This innovative format is one that we will most likely return to in JEMS, as we think that it provides an accessible way for leading scholars to get across their ideas to new audiences away from the usual strictures of academic writing.

Issue 2 starts with an article by Anna Korteweg and Gökçe Yurdakul that presents the state-of-the-art of their collaborative research agenda, ‘Non-Belonging: Borders, Boundaries, and Bodies at the Interface of Migration and Citizenship Studies’ (2024). This piece was the Keynote for the 2022 SCMR-JEMS international conference. Our 10th SCMR-JEMS Annual conference ‘Re-thinking Migration and Inclusion in a Divided World’ was held at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research on 18th October, 2023. This year's event also served to mark the SCMR’s recognition as a Centre of Excellence at the University and was attended by over 150 scholars, students and practitioners. Mary Waters (Harvard) delivered the keynote on: ‘Climate Change and Integration’. Building on eighteen years of detailed research, following the hardships of people displaced by the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans that caused enormous destruction and significant loss of life, she advocates a people-focussed sociological approach. Mary’s presentation argued that climate change impacts and political responses exacerbate inequalities, while community and social networks remain crucial resources for displaced people to try to rebuild their lives in the face of environmental disasters. This keynote article will be published in 2025. We were also delighted at the SCMR/JEMS event to host talks by Merlin Schaeffer (Copenhagen) on perceptions of discrimination, Lucy Mayblin (Sheffield) on borders and illiberal racism, Linda Morrice (Sussex) on refugee integration, and Mike Slaven (Lincoln) on the politics of border security.

Before closing, I would like to extend my thanks to my friends and colleagues from our in-house editorial review team, whose hidden dedicated work keeps JEMS grinding slowly forward throughout the year: Laura Cleton, Aleks Lewicki, Laura Morosanu, Nicole Ostrand, Zerrin Salikutluk, Sarah Scuzzarello, Bingyu Wang, Reinhard Schweitzer, James Hampshire and Rahsaan Maxwell. Also, I acknowledge our colleagues at Taylor and Francis, who are very supportive of and committed to JEMS, Elizabeth Walker, Erato Basea, Matthew Derbyshire, Claire Summerfield and Marissa Nania, while Debraj Chattaraj in production does lots of essential hand-on work that keeps us moving forward.

Sadly, we are no longer able to publish our ‘Thanks to reviewers’ in the print version of the journal because it apparently contravenes data protection (GDPR) rules. So, I would like to extend my personal gratitude and respect for the essential reviewing work that many of you do for us, at a time when the academic careers are increasingly time-pressurised.

Wishing you all a great 2024!

Paul