YSI–EAEPE Summer School 2025: Reimagining Migration Economics through a Pluralist Lens
18th EAEPE Summer School
Co-organised by YSI & EAEPE
Scuola di Economia e Studi Aziendali – Roma Tre University, Rome
Dates: 30 June – 2 July 2025
Format: Lectures, workshops, and PhD presentations
Target group: PhD students and early-career researchers
Overview
The 18th EAEPE Summer School explores migration through a pluralist and heterodox lens, offering a space to critically engage with mainstream models of migration economics. Rather than reducing migration to a narrow question of labour supply and individual utility maximisation, the Summer School approaches migration as a multidimensional process shaped by structural, historical, political, ecological, and cultural forces.
Participants will have the opportunity to learn from internationally renowned scholars, engage in interdisciplinary dialogue, and receive detailed feedback on their own research in a collaborative and non-hierarchical environment.
Description
People have always moved—between rural and urban areas, across borders, within regions, and across continents—reshaping economic, cultural, and psychological landscapes. Yet contemporary political and economic debates often frame migration as a novel “crisis” threatening Western industrialised nations, focusing narrowly on movements from formerly colonised regions to the so-called Global North.
Migration, however, cannot be understood through a single perspective. It may be driven by individual aspirations, capitalist labour demands, imperial and institutional structures, environmental pressures, or cultural and social networks. Some move in search of opportunity; others are forcibly displaced by war, political instability, or ecological collapse. While some cross borders as legitimised “expats,” others are criminalised and exposed to violence at borders marked by barbed wire, deserts, and salt.
Mainstream economics tends to abstract from these complexities, portraying migrants as rational actors responding to market signals. Scholars across the social sciences have long criticised this approach for ignoring power relations, historical inequalities, and the broader social and ecological contexts in which migration occurs.
In response, the Summer School advances a pluralist framework, drawing on heterodox economics and interdisciplinary perspectives. Migration is treated as a process embedded in interconnected systems—economic, social, ecological, and historical—that shape global patterns of movement. Participants will explore perspectives including political economy, institutional analysis, ecological constraints, social reproduction, and colonial legacies.
Rather than one-directional teaching, the Summer School emphasises co-learning, workshop formats, and non-formal education methods, fostering collective reflection and the co-development of new ideas.
Speakers
- Roberto Basile – Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”
- Merve Burnazoglu – Utrecht University, School of Economics
- Elena Giacomelli – Università di Bologna & Columbia University
- Cristina Giudici – Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”
- Peo Hansen – Linköping University
- Rama Dasi Mariani – Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Participation
The Summer School is open to PhD students and early-career researchers, particularly those working within institutional, evolutionary, and heterodox traditions, though applications from all relevant approaches are welcome.
Relevant research areas include (but are not limited to):
- Social Economics
- Public Economics
- Migration Economics
- Development Economics
- Macroeconomics
- Labour Economics
- Urban and Regional Economics
- Economic History
- Evolutionary and Comparative Economics
- Innovation, Industrial Policy, and Migration
Lectures by senior scholars will take place in the mornings, while afternoons are dedicated to presentations by advanced PhD students and early-career researchers. Selected participants will also act as discussants for peer contributions.
Scientific and Organising Committee
- Pasquale Tridico (Roma Tre University)
- Enrico Sergio Levrero (Roma Tre University)
- Sebastiano Fadda (Roma Tre University)
- Federica Arena (Roma Tre University)
- Jakob Nitschke (Sapienza University of Rome)
- Walter Paternesi Meloni (Sapienza University of Rome)
- Vincenzo Pistucci (Roma Tre University)
- Luigi Salvati (Università Telematica Pegaso)
This Summer School is co-funded by the Young Scholars Initiative (YSI).