BRIDGES: Assessing the production and impact of migration narratives in a time of polarisation

Bringing together 12 universities and institutions across Europe, the BRIDGES project aims at further understanding the production, evolution, and impact of migration narratives in and beyond Europe. Three years after its launch, the project’s final conference, titled Discussing migration narratives’ policy and societal implications, is taking place in Brussels, on 1 February 2024. The event will be an opportunity to discuss the project’s main findings, to exchange with other research projects working on similar topics, and to bridge the gap between research and policymaking in a dialogue with members of the European Parliament.

In a context of increasing polarisation around migration and migrants, this Horizon 2020 project sets out to understand the causes and consequences of migration narratives, by focusing on six European countries: France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. To do so, BRIDGES adopts an interdisciplinary and co-productive approach, addressing these narratives on an academic, policy, and societal level. This allows it to:

• Analyse how certain migration narratives become dominant over others;
• Foster evidence-based policy decisions through policy recommendations;
• Create spaces of dialogue between the actors involved in the production of migration narratives.

Background

Financed by the EU with almost EUR 3 million, the BRIDGES project was launched in March 2021 and will end in March 2024. It is implemented by a diverse consortium of universities, think tanks, research centres, cultural associations, and civil society organisations. Their aim is to build bridges between different areas of knowledge and methodologies, between the various stages in the development of migration narratives, as well as between research and practice.

The project’s findings will result in the creation of a typology of government strategies to help face populist narratives on migration. Other important deliverables include three interactive workshops with policy, media, and civil society actors, an itinerant photojournalism exhibition, and two hip hop contests to reflect on the challenges of multicultural and increasingly diverse societies.

Find out more

The project’s closing Conference will be live streamed through the BRIDGES YouTube channel. Moreover, policy briefs, working papers, and other publications can be accessed through the BRIDGES library.