Multi-Sited Ethnographic Approaches to Migration and Social Change

Multi-sited ethnography has emerged as a vital method for tracing the trajectories of migration and the complex social transformations it engenders. Rather than focusing on a single community, this approach follows people, objects and practices across multiple locations, enabling researchers to capture transnational networks, shifting identities and the ways in which global forces intersect with local lifeworlds. It foregrounds the mobility of actors—migrants, kin networks and policy frameworks—and examines how these mobilities reshape social relations, economic opportunities and cultural norms in both sending and receiving sites. By combining participant observation, interviews and documentary analysis across geographically dispersed fields, multi-sited ethnography uncovers how migrants navigate institutional boundaries, negotiate belonging and generate new forms of social organisation. The method also challenges ethnographers to reflect on their own positionality as they move between sites and to develop strategies for maintaining analytical coherence amid diverse contexts. In studies of migration, this approach has shed light on processes such as co-ethnic resettlement, gendered forms of mobility, translocal labour markets and the digital mediation of social ties. It thus offers a panoramic yet finely grained account of how migration drives social change at multiple scales, from intimate household practices to global policy regimes.

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Multi-Sited Ethnographic Approaches to Migration and Social Change publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in multi-sited ethnographic approaches to migration and social change across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Multi-sited ethnography: An approach that conducts ethnographic fieldwork across several locations to capture the movement of people, ideas and practices.

Co-ethnic migration: The movement of individuals from one country or region to another based on shared ethnic or cultural identity, often linked to specific diaspora policies.

Boundary-making: The processes by which social, cultural or institutional divides are created, maintained or contested between groups or places.

Mind mapping: A visual tool for organising qualitative data in a network of themes, facilitating comparison across large, multi-sited datasets.

References

1. Everywhere and nowhere at once: the challenges of following in multi-sited ethnography. Journal of Organizational Ethnography (2020).
2. Mind mapping in qualitative data analysis: Managing interview data in interdisciplinary and multi‐sited research projects. Geo Geography and Environment (2022).
3. Co-ethnic Migration of Vojvodina Slovaks to Slovakia: Institutional Frameworks and Everyday Practices of Interaction. Nationalities Papers (2024).
4. Everyday Practices of Gender in the Serbian Community of Post-War South-East Kosovo. Genealogy (2022).