BRIDGES: Assessing the production and impact of migration narratives is a project funded by the H2020 EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation and implemented by a consortium of 12 institutions from all over Europe.

The project aims to understand the causes and consequences of migration narratives in a context of increasing politicisation and polarisation 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 and is implemented by a diverse consortium formed by universities, think tanks and research centres, cultural associations, and civil society organisations.

The Hungarian participant of the project is Endre Sik, Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences.

The first publication of the project can be downloaded here.

How is gender involved in the migration process? What are the effects of migration on gender relations? And how those relations impact the representation of migration in turn? How do media and politics shape migration narratives from a gender perspective? These are some of the key questions that the BRIDGES Gender Guidelines try to answer by providing a conceptual and methodological framework for the inclusion of a gender and intersectional perspective in migration studies, and in the analysis of migration narratives, more specifically.

These Guidelines are one of the core tasks of the BRIDGES Gender Observatory, whose aim is to ensure the inclusion of this perspective throughout the project, from data-gathering and analysis to co-production and dissemination activities. To this end, this publication offers some guidance on how to adopt a gender perspective when defining sampling methods and searching for data, both during fieldwork and literature review stages of the research. It also identifies a series of dimensions, indicators, and key questions that will ensure that the project remains gender-sensitive throughout the different Work Packages.

Since there is scarce literature on this topic, these Guidelines may indeed be useful as a general theoretical and methodological framework for any other project dealing with narratives or migration issues, and willing to include a gender and intersectional perspective as a cross-cutting feature of its research.