I was honoured to write the Foreword for the edited volume Researching Migration on Indigenous Lands: Challenges, Reflections, Pathways, edited by Andonis Piperoglou and Francesco Ricatti and published in the IMISCOE Research Series (2026). This collection arrives at a critical moment, as migration research is increasingly called upon to reckon with Indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, and the enduring legacies of dispossession.
In my Foreword, I reflect on what it means to conduct migration research on unceded Indigenous lands. Writing from my position as a Kamilaroi and Wonnarua scholar with Punjabi Muslim heritage, I foreground the argument that research is never neutral. Our intellectual work is always shaped by histories of power, migration, and colonial violence, and this demands ethical accountability rather than distance or abstraction.
The volume challenges dominant approaches within migration studies that too often celebrate diversity while overlooking the ways migration has been entangled with settler colonial projects. By centring Indigenous sovereignties, the contributors collectively call for a relational ethics of research—one grounded in responsibility, humility, reciprocity, and long-term engagement with Indigenous communities and Country.
My Foreword sets the tone for this intervention by emphasising reflexivity not as a performative gesture, but as a relational responsibility. The chapters that follow demonstrate how migration research can be reimagined when Indigenous epistemologies, governance, and relational obligations are taken seriously, opening up possibilities for more just and transformative scholarly practices.
I invite readers to engage with the Foreword below and to explore the broader conversations this book advances about migration, sovereignty, and ethical research on Indigenous lands.
Read the Foreword and access the book here: Researching on storied lands