This session focuses on the institutional, technological, material, and social infrastructures through which migration is enabled, mediated, governed, and constrained. Moving beyond approaches that privilege either individual agency or state policy alone, it highlights the broader arrangements and intermediaries that organize migration, including recruitment systems, visa regimes, transportation networks, digital platforms, welfare institutions, labor markets, and community-based support structures.

The session invites empirically grounded and conceptually informed research on how such infrastructures shape migrants’ mobility, settlement, labor incorporation, legal status, and everyday life. Topics may include labor migration, marriage migration, refugee governance, student mobility, border infrastructures, care infrastructures, return migration, and diasporic connection. Although centered on Asia, the session also welcomes comparative and analytically relevant work from beyond the region.

This session examines how climate change and environmental degradation are generating new forms of migration and displacement, bringing the issue of climate and environmental refugees to the forefront of scholarly and policy debate. While refugee studies have traditionally centered on war, civil conflict, and political persecution, this session broadens the analytical lens to consider how environmental crises increasingly shape patterns of human movement.

Particular attention will be given to the Eurasian region, where phenomena such as desertification in Central Asia, sea-level rise in South Asia, water scarcity in West Asia, and permafrost degradation in the Arctic and subarctic zones of Siberia are producing diverse and underexamined forms of environmentally driven migration. By moving beyond conflict-centered understandings of displacement, the session seeks to explore how climate and environmental pressures intersect with broader social, political, and economic contexts. We invite paper submissions on topics including, but not limited to, the following themes:

- Conceptual and definitional debates on “climate refugees” and “environmental refugees”
- Legal status and international protection frameworks for environmentally displaced persons
- Climate-induced migration patterns in the Eurasian region: Central Asia, West Asia, South Asia, Arctic and subarctic zones of Siberia
- State and intergovernmental responses to climate- and environment-driven displacement
- Community-level adaptation strategies in the face of environmental crisis
- The intersection of climate and environmental pressures with social, political, and economic drivers of migration

This session explores how demographic transformation and youth mobility are reshaping Northeast Asian societies in the context of slow growth, ultra-low fertility, aging populations, regional inequality, and youth precarity. It argues that conventional explanations centered on labor demand or developmentalist state policy are no longer sufficient to explain contemporary forms of youth movement and settlement.

By examining issues such as metropolitan concentration, local extinction, rural in-migration, transnational youth mobility, and alternative life-course strategies, the session seeks to reconceptualize youth migration as a complex phenomenon situated at the intersection of structural constraint and existential choice. While rooted in Northeast Asia, the session also opens a broader comparative horizon by situating these developments alongside parallel transformations in other parts of the world. In doing so, it aims to position Northeast Asian youth mobility as a productive vantage point for understanding post-developmentalist social change more broadly.

We welcome submissions from scholars across multiple disciplines – including sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, and economics – and particularly encourage interdisciplinary and inter-regional comparative research. The session invites paper submissions on topics including, but not limited to, the following themes:

- Comparative analysis of youth mobility and immobility patterns in Northeast Asia
- Regional inequality, local extinction, spatial inequality, and the reconstitution of locality
- Alternative life course strategies and community-based experiments among youth generations
- The dissolution and reorganization of the standard life course model in the post-developmentalist era
- Transnational youth migration and new possibilities for regional solidarity in Northeast Asia
- The impacts of climate crisis, disasters, and environmental change on local communities and spatial mobility

This session moves beyond treating migration as a mere outcome of crisis, seeking instead to illuminate how it is experienced, remembered, and represented. While existing scholarship has emphasized macroscopic frameworks like economic rationality and state policy, our focus is on the lived experiences and cultural memories these approaches often overlook. We draw particular attention to the tension between state-centered “records” that aim to categorize and govern migrants, and the alternative “narratives”—found in literature, oral history, and the arts—that articulate what escapes or exceeds official documentation.

By reading archival sources alongside cultural texts, the session explores both the structures of power embedded in records and the rich textures of affect, memory, and imagination expressed in narrative forms. In doing so, it offers a crucial humanistic and historical lens through which to analyze contemporary migration challenges. Ultimately, this session approaches migration not simply as the movement of people, but as a dynamic process where ideas, identities, and cultural forms circulate and are reconfigured across borders, especially in our current age of multi-crisis.

We invite submissions from scholars in history, literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, film and media studies, translation studies, and related fields. Interdisciplinary approaches are especially encouraged. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

- The politics of memory in migration histories: contests between archives, testimonies, and historiography
- Gaps and dissonances between state documentation and migrants’ lived experiences
- Literary and cultural representations of migration and diaspora in the age of multi-crisis
- Language, translation, and narrative strategies of displacement
- The transnational circulation and transformation of ideas, religions, and cultural practices
- Everyday practices of diasporic identity and community formation