Call for Papers: Historicizing the Migration / Anti-Gender Nexus

Amiens, France, 24-25 September 2026

Deadline for Abstracts: 15 June 2026
Notification of Results: End of June 2026

How have anxieties about migration historically intersected with hostility toward gender transformation, women’s autonomy, sexual diversity, and changing family structures? While contemporary scholarship increasingly identifies a political convergence between anti-migrant and anti-gender movements, the historical roots of this relationship remain insufficiently explored.

This workshop aims at interrogating the historical entanglements of migration and gender backlash. This call invites contributions to conceptualise and historicise the migration–anti-gender nexus, examining how fears surrounding migration, demographic transformation, urbanisation, and shifting social orders have been articulated through gendered and sexualised discourses across time.

We seek to move beyond presentist understandings of anti-gender politics by investigating the historical interconnections between migration regimes, mobility patterns, and resistance to changing gender norms. In many historical settings, anxieties surrounding migration have been inseparable from concerns about women’s mobility, sexual morality, masculinities, reproduction, kinship, labour, and national or imperial decline. Migration has often been portrayed as destabilising social hierarchies, threatening family structures, and disrupting “natural” gender orders.

This thematic issue aims to ask: How can we historicise the migration–anti-gender nexus?  What conceptual and methodological tools enable us to understand the long durée of connections between migration and gender backlash?

We particularly welcome contributions that investigate historical moments in which mobility and anti-gender attitudes became mutually constitutive, including but not limited to:

• Internal migration, especially mobility to expanding cities and the moral panics associated with women’s independence, remunerated labour, sexuality, domestic service, traditional gender normative roles;
• nineteenth-century transatlantic migrations, including fears surrounding family dislocation, racial mixity, prostitution, degeneration, reproductive anxieties, or the destabilisation of patriarchal orders;
• early twentieth-century migration regimes, encompassing migration restriction, nationalism, imperial governance, eugenics, pronatalism, moral regulation, and the policing of sexuality and reproduction;
• colonial and imperial contexts, where migration governance intersected with racialised and gendered hierarchies;
• religious, nationalist, and conservative responses to mobility, including discourses about morality, motherhood, masculinity, and “social disorder”;
• labour migration and gender anxieties, including concerns surrounding domestic work, feminised migration, bachelor communities, and perceived threats to social cohesion;
• migration, race, and sexuality, including the production of moral panics around interracial intimacy, queerness, or non-normative households;
• (political reasoning beyond) anti-gender impact of deportations and forced migrations 
• conceptual and historiographical interventions aimed at theorising the historical relationship between migration and anti-gender politics.

We encourage contributions adopting intersectional, transnational, comparative, and longue durée perspectives, and welcome submissions from historians as well as scholars in migration studies, gender studies, political history, historical sociology, historical demography, cultural studies, geography, and related disciplines from a historical perpective.

Possible guiding questions include:

• How have anti-migration sentiments historically relied on gendered assumptions?
• In what ways have concerns over migration reinforced anxieties about women’s emancipation, masculinities, sexuality, or reproduction?
• How have migration policies and anti-gender ideologies co-evolved?
• Can anti-gender politics be understood as reactions to broader histories of mobility and social transformation?
• What historical continuities and ruptures can be identified between past and present migration/gender backlashes?

We strongly encourage junior colleagues (Young Researchers and Innovators) as well as colleagues from Inclusivness Targeted Countries.

Submission Details :

Please submit an abstract of 300–500 words and a short biographical note by 15 June 2026 to Heidi.Hein-Kircher@ruhr-uni-bochum.de and marie.jose.ruiz@u-picardie.fr

Applicants will be notified of results by the end of June 2026.

Outcomes :

Selected papers are expected to contribute to both:

1. A proposed special issue in either the Journal of Migration History or the Women on the Move series in Open Research Europe (deadline : December 31);
2. A public history thematic dossier to be published online, aimed at fostering broader engagement with the historical dimensions of migration and anti-gender politics (December 31).

Applicants are expected to commit to both outcomes outlined above. No proposal will be selected without a clear commitment to contribute to these post-conference outputs.

For reimbursement reasons, each participant should be registered via e-cost.eu in CA23149. Reimbursement will be finalised according to the COST Association’s annotated rules.

Of course, we’d welcome participants travelling with their own budget.