The international conference 'Migration, Islam and Masculinities: Transforming Emigration and Immigration Societies' took place at the University of Oldenburg, from 12 to 14 April 2007.

The theme of the conference 'Migration, Islam and Masculinities: Transforming Emigration and Immigration Societies' is essentially a research desiderata. On the one hand there are few research projects in migration studies which use masculinity as a category of analysis. On the other hand migration has been neglected in studies on masculinities, and migrant masculinities have not really been considered as an independent topic. This noticeable lack of research into ethnic and national differences of masculinities needs to be addressed.

This is particularly true of the investigation of Muslim migrant masculinities. Subsequent to the attacks on 11 September 2001, this was identified as a specific research area with an explicit emphasis on differences between ‘Western’ and ‘Muslim’ or migrant identities. Although the experience of migration has been, and remains, a constitutive factor for the biographies of numerous leaders of different factions of political Islam, it has been neglected in research. The same goes for the diverse formations of Islam in diaspora and their relation to (re)constructions of masculinities.

This conference represents an attempt to bring together results from research projects in the fields of ‘Migration and Masculinity’ and ‘Masculinity and Islam’. An analytical look at the field of 'Migration, Islam and Masculinities' should be interdisciplinary and take different factors into account. We specifically wish to stimulate a theoretical debate.

The conference was funded by the German Research Foundation and the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, and was led by Dr. Lydia Potts, Dr. Dursun Tan, Dr. María do Mar Castro Varela, Dr. Nikita Dhawan and Martina Kamp, MA.