Research
As an interdisciplinary research centre exploring migration and displacement, our current, interlinked thematic focus areas are Moral B/orders & the Politics of Belonging, Socio-Spatial Transformations, and Mobilities, Health & Wellbeing. Each theme connects conceptual inquiry with applied projects, policy engagement, and creative public scholarship.
Across all themes, we blend mixed methods with community co-production, data visualisation, and ethical fieldwork. Findings move beyond journal articles into tools, briefs, teaching resources, and interactive platforms. Many initiatives have grown into research-linked projects and networks that live beyond individual grants.
Whether you are a journalist, policymaker, practitioner, scholar, or student interested in migration, you will find research that is methodologically strong, regionally rooted, and globally relevant \xe2\x80\x94 designed to inform decisions and improve lives.
Thematic focus areas
Research-Linked Projects
Different areas of our research are linked to specific projects — some of which have grown into established entities of their own.
Launched by ACMS in 2016, Xenowatch is an open-source platform for collecting, visualizing, and interactively mapping information and data on xenophobic discrimination in South Africa. It allows crowdsourcing of information through email, WhatsApp, and phone calls. Xenowatch tracks, verifies, and analyses all incidents of xenophobic discrimination, along with responses from government and civil society.
Serving as an early warning system, it alerts stakeholders to threats, violence, and other forms of discrimination, and calls for timely and appropriate intervention. Its data analysis identifies causal factors and community risk profiles, supporting more effective prevention and conflict resolution strategies.
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Research project that aims to investigate the viability of movement building for migrant rights in the South African context, characterised by growing xenophobic populism and discrimination, as well as push-back by an active, albeit fragmented civil society ecosystem.
The project seeks to define strategic and proactive advocacy for migrant rights, identify engagement strategies with various partners, and support the migrant sector in crafting new narratives and long-term strategies to shift policy perspectives, for a more effective protection of migrants rights in the country.
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The Mobility Governance Lab (MGL) explores the governance of mobility at multiple scales across the global south. It is an autonomous, critical space working to realise principles of innovation, independence, and equitable partnership. Through collaborative research, it offers original insight and perspectives to scholars, civil society, and practitioners while fostering the next generation of engaged researchers from Africa and beyond.
Initially conceived around human mobility as a heuristic providing insights into practical workings and transformations of regulatory and governance systems.
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The Atlas of Uncertainty is a publication, an exhibit, and a digital platform. It integrates written essays, visual art, statistics, sound, and critical cartography. Created dialogically, it offers layered and nuanced understandings of transforming urban spaces and the moral and material economies that bind them. It is at once a tool of knowledge communication and a reflection on what we believe and how we know it.
The Atlas aims to move from the “census” to the “senses”, evoking sensorial and embodied experiences of the material, in ways that challenge traditional ways of representing African cities.
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Africa’s social diversity is being reshaped by the mobility of those within it. Their movements and interactions are generating novel social and political configurations that give cause to reconsider the spatial, ethical, and conceptual foundations of social and political theory. These include definitions and responses to the ‘other’; the spatial bases of political community; and how mobility and translocal connections are positioning African cities and Africans within global circulation of values and power.
The initiatives conducted by Chair affiliates and students are radically interdisciplinary and destabilising, in ways that provide insights into underexplored processes with acute theoretical and practical significance. These inquiries work across sub-Saharan Africa and in partnership with scholars on four continents.
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The CoRE in Migration & Health will address the key scientific challenge of identifying and developing solutions, relevant to the social, cultural and political contexts, to address the root causes of poor health among migrants to enhance the positive health outcomes of migration across one of the largest migration corridors globally, the African Union (AU) – European Union (EU) corridor.
The CoRE is co-led by Jo Vearey (ACMS & the ARUA Centre of Excellence in Migration & Mobility, Wits University) and Soorej Jose Puthoopparambil (Uppsala University). It involves multiple partners and is supported by the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) and The Guild of Research-Intensive European Universities.
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The African LGBTQI Migration Research Network (ALMN) aims to advance scholarship on LGBTQI+ migration on, from and to the African continent, bringing together scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and service providers to spark critical conversations, promote knowledge exchange, support evidence-based policy responses, and initiate effective and ethical collaborations.
ALMN recognises that LGBTQI+ migration does not simply happen from the African continent, but also within and across (imposed) national borders. We are committed to both reorienting LGBTQI+ migration scholarship towards the Global South, and promoting knowledge produced within the Global South in order to challenge systemic inequality within the global academy.
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GEMMS is an NIHR-funded Global Health Research Group involving collaboration between ACMS, the University of Essex, the Tata Institute for Health Sciences (TISS) in India, Africa University in Zimbabwe and Health Poverty Action (HPA). The link between Gendered Violence (GV) and poor Mental and psychosocial Health (MH) is widely acknowledged, yet poorly understood.
The GEMMS research group brings together academics with a range of relevant GV and MH expertise and practitioners who provide on-going support to migrants, to establish a programme of work that generates new knowledge and improved understandings, and co-designs evidence-informed training interventions and public health solutions.
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In Southern Africa, mobile adolescents and young people (mAYP) represent a substantial portion of the migrating population. Migration often restricts their access to health services, particularly sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information and quality care, contributing to poor sexual health outcomes.
Nurture4Youth is an NIHR-funded Global Health Research Group involving collaboration between ACMS, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the Africa Health Research Initiative (AHRI) and Zambart. Our goal is to build and strengthen a dynamic research partnership focused on producing policy-relevant insights that support mobile adolescents and young people.
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