Few things shape our world more profoundly than migration. While some see migration as hardwired into humans, processes of globalization have intensified the speed and impact of migratory flows by establishing evermore connections between faraway places. Millions of people migrate every year, both within countries, usually from rural to urban areas, and across national borders, within and between the Global South and the Global North. Migration is motivated by a multitude of reasons – including a search for a better livelihood, escape from political instability or a flee from religious persecution. Broader structural and environmental factors, notably climate change, increasingly act as triggers of migration. Related to those motives, questions about who can arrive and who cannot are highly contested political issues, with the so-called “refugee crisis” galvanizing the public debate, which is increasingly polarized between those, especially on the political right, who want to keep the borders of their countries impenetrable to potential arrivals, and those who welcome the desperate and the needy as well as the entrepreneurial nomads. Of course, as people migrate so does capital, culture, ideas and ways of thinking, resulting in a creative, if sometimes volatile cross-pollination, between societies, economies and value systems, disrupting Western-centric modes of knowledge production. The debate about migration thus turns into one concerning social change as such. But while the world is on the move, social sciences have not yet overcome the “methodological nationalism” (Beck 2007) that keeps scholars ill-prepared to identify and analyse the diverse, hybrid and creolized nature of much of human interactions today. This conference aims to capture the implications of migration – of people and ideas – in politics, economy and culture.