ABSTRACT
The Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary University of London was launched in November 1995 with a conference entitled ‘London the Promised Land? The Migrant Experience in a Capital City’. Two years later an edited volume of the same name was published which consisted of selected papers from that conference together with others specially commissioned. They were a mixture of the historical and the contemporary and were a clear pronouncement of the Centre’s intention to highlight and encourage the growing interdisciplinary nature of migration studies. For many years migration had been a theme which formed part of the academic discourse but was not regarded as a subject in itself. However, from the 1970s onwards, migration began to emerge as a specific topic – though not then, and still not even today, an independent discipline – focused on and claimed by many, but not able to stand alone. By the mid-1990s work on migration was burgeoning, undertaken by academics and practitioners in an ever expanding range of research projects and professions. Much has been written, in a variety of disciplines and contexts about migration and migrants, yet only a small number of books have focused solely on London, one of the early few being London the Promised Land? The Immigrant Experience in a Capital City (Kershen, 1997) published in 1997. That collection of essays, the outcome of the 1995 conference, became the first in a series now known as Studies in Migration and Diaspora, which currently (early 2015), has a published list of 38 titles, with still more in the pipeline for the coming years. 1 A read-through of that list will confirm how migration studies have proliferated; globally and locally, thematically, theoretically and methodologically.
