Counter methodologies to international migration framing

Nenna Orie Chuku, Annemaree Lloyd, Adam Crymble and Oliver Duke Williams, UCL

(Project no. 2002822)

This project aims to answer the guiding question: for how long can West Africans be seen in this dataset? To answer this, the following research questions are asked:
1. How is West African presence constructed in the LS?
2. How is migration constructed in the LS?
3. Where can West African presence be found most frequently, and how are they found?

Due to the number of West African countries, the focus is on data of Sierra Leoneans, Nigerians, Ghanaians and Gambians. Through answering the above questions, the project examines how long this group of West Africans are present in the UK and how they can be found in the data. Whilst the primary unit of analysis for this project is the classification and metadata presented to users of the ONS LS data, the total count across the years is used to ask questions on whether or how people “disappear” (i.e. are missing) from the data and what assumptions can be made about this disappearance (missingness).

The project is part of a larger doctoral research project which explores how the information experiences of West African returnees challenge the framework and arrangement of Eurocentric information systems that are used to understand international migration.

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