The Guest Editors of the Special Issue of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies on “Men and Migration in Europe and beyond” warmly welcome scholarly contributions from researchers working on the issues pertaining to the international migration and mobilities, critical men and and masculinities studies. This special issue aims at collecting and broadening the scholarly knowledge on the issues concentrated on the presence of male migrants in the receiving societies.

Although gender perspectives have guided migration research for several decades, the use of a ‘gender’ lens appears to primarily result in the investigations focused on women. A compensatory trend of recognizing the processes of feminization and family reunification migration patterns has simultaneously led to an omission of the mobile men and masculinities in the recent scholarly investigations (Charsley and Wray 2015). This situation has changed slightly since the beginning of the 21st century, when a handful of researchers started conducting analyses of the specificity of the migrant men’s experiences and their positioning in the sending and receiving country societies. Nevertheless, to this day on the coverage predominantly tackles a small number of issues, such as the role of migrant men in the labour market or the negative consequences of mobility for men. Criminality and sexism were particularly pinpointed as the frequently discussed dimensions (Griffiths 2015) and linked to social problems. While the policy construes migrant women as the agents of change, capable of altering the patriarchal and oppressive gender regimes (Okin 1999, Roggeband and Verloo 2007), the male positionalities are marked by problematic issues of domestic and sexual violence, youth criminality, and culturally-specific crimes. As a consequence, a scholarly portrait of migrant men is not only biased, but also fails to recognize the vast heterogeneity of migrant men’s identities and experiences. The men are seen as belonging to a rather homogeneous group either causing or, in pinch dealing, being ridden with similar problems. On the contrary, few analyses yield themselves to framing mobile men as part of a complex and diverse social category with their masculinities understood as intersectional and multidimensional social phenomena.

Therefore, the main aim of this Special Issue is to foster and strengthen the presence and visibility of an interdisciplinary discussion of men in migration, bringing together studies centred on the multidimensional and intersectional aspects of male experiences and identities, migrant men’s practices, their roles in the host societies, public perceptions of the ‘foreign’ men, and the encounters between varied migrant and non-migrant masculinities. We would like to address the topics of migrant men’s vulnerability, discrimination (in the labour market, state institutions and in the public sphere), and men-to-men violence, as well as the impact of migration on gender equality. The special issue engages with the dominant themes of the evolution of masculinity e.g. hegemonic versus subordinated and marginalised masculinities (Connell 2005), caring masculinity (Hanlon 2012, Elliott 2015), fatherhood models and migrant men’s social activism. Thus, while publishing the relevant key works in NORMA, we would like to create a space for the analysis and discussion of men and migration issues in the transnational space.

We welcome submissions from different regions and disciplines, provided that they further the understanding of the intersectional aspects of the men and migration topic.

We solicit papers in English (for non-native speakers it is required that have the manuscript proofread by a native speaker). Your work should not exceed 8000 words, including abstract, references and figures. More detailed authors’ guidelines can be found here.

All papers will be peer reviewed. The full length papers should be submitted directly to both Editors of this issue:

Katarzyna Wojnicka (Centre for European Research & Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden) email: katarzyna.wojnicka@gu.se
Paula Pustulka (SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland) email: paulapustulka@gmail.com by

December 20, 2016.

Decisions on the acceptance of the papers and reviews will be completed by February 28, 2017.
Final papers should be submitted by April 28, 2017.
The publication of the special issue is scheduled for 2017