Jørgen Carling on Aspiration, feat. Kerilyn Schewel

From his notable research on migration aspirations and the factors that shape whether people move or stay, Jørgen Carling reflects on how his early experiences in Oslo and fieldwork in West Africa shaped his approach to understanding mobility. He is joined by Kerilyn Schewel, whose work examines why people remain in place and how life goals, family ties and social constraints influence those decisions. 

Guests: Jørgen Carling, Professor in Migration and Transnationalism studies, Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO); Kerilyn Schewel, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina.

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Transcript

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, the podcast that explores migration through bold research new ideas and stories that connect those findings to the real world. This season, we're talking with migration scholars whose ideas have left a lasting mark on the field. Then we dig deeper to uncover the paths that brought them here, the turning points, lived experiences, and insights that shaped the theories redefining how we understand mobility, borders and belonging. Each scholar has been asked to nominate an up-and-coming researcher whose work they admire. In the chat, established voices and emerging thinkers come together in conversation to explore the connective tissue between the past, present and future of migration studies.  From the personal to the political, from theory to practice, these conversations uncover not just what our guests study, but how their lives and work have helped shape the field and where they see it heading next. In this episode, we start with Jørgen Carling, a scholar who brings migration into focus before anyone sets foot on a plane or crosses a border. Jørgen is a research professor in migration and transnationalism studies at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO). His work reveals how aspirations, constraints and chance shape the first steps in people's journeys, including those that never happen at all. Although Jørgen is originally from Oslo, his parents sparked an early curiosity about the world through family stories and time spent living in Gambia. These experiences led to Jørgen's own connection to Africa and planted early questions about living across borders. These days, he's still asking those questions and exploring how people imagine creating a life somewhere new long before they ever move.

Jørgen Carling  

So, I grew up in the suburbs of Oslo in a house that my father built in the garden of his childhood home. He was a novelist. We had a little house in the in the garden that was a former hen house that was converted into his writing den. So, he went out there every morning and sat there writing and wrote more than fifty books in the course of his life. And my mother was a special education teacher. As a young, young woman, early 20s, went to work for the Norwegian Peace Corps in Uganda. And that turned out to be very important for the rest of her life. So, that sort of became the beginning of her strong connection with Africa, which I think she passed on to me. So, as a two-year-old, I spent this time with my parents in in the Gambia and that became the beginning of my connection with Africa.

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen's childhood home continues to play an active role in his life. Now, it's a compelling passion project.

Jørgen Carling  

My father's best childhood friend was an architect, and he ended up drawing the house for my father in his 30s, and my father really loved the house. And after he passed away, my mother lived there for 20 years on her own, and also really came to love it. And then when she passed away last year, my wife, Heidi and I were agonizing, in a way, over what to do with the house, because we knew that if we put it on the market, there's a big chance that it would be bought by investors who would just knock it down and build new houses. At the same time, it wasn't suited for our family, and it was also not quite in the condition that made it attractive as a rental object. You could always rent out housing, but to really find somebody who would appreciate the house for what it was, we realized that we also needed to upgrade.

Maggie Perzyna  

For Jørgen, renovating his childhood home serves as catharsis and a reflection of his expertise. It's an honoring of Norwegian design and an extension of his parents' creativity. Throughout the process, he finds ways to return value to the setting that gave him what he needed as a child. He feels a deep responsibility to preserve its integrity.

Jørgen Carling  

It ended up being a wonderful process, I think, of letting go of things that we had to let go and also preserving and retracing some of the original thinking behind the behind the house. And then, fortunately, we put it on the rental market and hoped that we would find tenants who really appreciated the architectural qualities of the house. And there was a wonderful match with a Swedish photographer and a British marketing executive who now really love the house in the same way that I did as a child and my parents did. And it's wonderful to see how they've now turned it into their home, and they're sharing photos of it on Instagram, and I really enjoy seeing the walls and so on that are so familiar to me and their perspective on it as people who now get to enjoy it.

Maggie Perzyna  

From home renovations to migration research, Jørgen is driven by the concept of origin. He's curious about how familiar places shape us, a thread woven through his own life. 

Jørgen Carling  

Halfway through my undergraduate studies, I developed strong interest in migration. So, I've studied different aspects of geography and really enjoyed the discipline, think, especially then seeing migration from the vantage point of societies of origin. That was something that immediately appealed to me and basically became the start of my career. And I remember at that time I was in the student newspaper, and we published an article by somebody who'd gone to do field work for his master's thesis in Botswana. He described how difficult it was to just go there for the first time and try to do research for his master's thesis. And I remember thinking, I also want to do field work, but I want to make sure that I'm prepared somehow, so that when I go there to do the research, I can start doing the research, and not just in a way, be lost, trying to orient myself.

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen's next stop took him to the island of Cape Verde, the tiny island in East Africa ultimately becomes the setting that helps shape his storied career.

Jørgen Carling  

I remember I was intrigued when I first saw Cape Verde mentioned in some book. I think, when I was in senior high school. That it's a barren place, but a place with a very strong culture and lots of things that just made me curious. And I knew that it was a country of massive out migration. So, I thought, well, if I want to go somewhere to study the effects of migration at a place of origin, this seems like a good place. And then I got to know Cape Verdeans in Norway, because Cape Verdeans are almost everywhere, including in Norway. And through them, I got to know a couple of families that I stayed with in Cape Verde. So, I spent a semester there and started learning the language and getting to know the places and establish a foundation for myself.

Maggie Perzyna  

A creative at heart, Jørgen nearly pursued a different profession, but even as a widely respected researcher in the migration field, he continues to rely on his artistic instincts.

Jørgen Carling  

I was also really into drawing and architecture. I thought about becoming an architect, and I remember spending lots of time drawing houses as a teenager and ended up sort of going back and forth between these two, two directions in life, so more like the social science direction and the design and visual construction. And I ended up pursuing the social science path, but the other path hasn't let go of me either. I really love carpentry and building things like furniture at home and so on. And I also embrace every opportunity to work visually. So, and I do get a lot of opportunities to do that in my research work.

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen credits his father Finn Carling for influencing his thought process. Finn was an award winning novelist, playwright and poet.

Jørgen Carling  

I gradually, sort of developed the love for writing, partly inspired by my father, although I didn't really discuss it that much with him, and I didn't read all his books, but still, I think I inherited some of that. He passed away more than 20 years ago, so I'm sorry that we didn't have more of an overlap in our writing careers, but it was an important part of my childhood.

Maggie Perzyna  

In a way, Jørgen keeps his father's legacy alive by pouring the same care and respect into his own writing. The process of transferring his thoughts to words on a page is a skill he continues to refine, and when that process happens to involve his own children, it's just another example of Jørgen's story coming full circle.

Jørgen Carling  

I went with my daughter to Wales, where she was attending a one week first aid course. And although she's old enough to have traveled there on her own, they insisted that a guardian or parent accompany the participants all the way. So, I did that and then spent the week on my own in a nearby pub and hotel, and I use that as a writing retreat for myself to kickstart the book that I'm writing now about migration aspirations.

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen's contributions to migration studies are both theoretically rich and enduring, but he also hopes the impact goes beyond citations.

Jørgen Carling  

As a researcher, I think there are two things I would love to be remembered for, and one is kind of visionary aspect of my research. So, I really love the creative part of research, the imaginary part of research, the excitement of doing something new and different, that's what I would like to be remembered for. So, not just the. The diligent, hard work, but the inspiring and visionary aspect of that work. And then I also hope to be remembered for generosity to other researchers. It warms my heart when I hear comments like that at conferences or elsewhere that you know what you did for me many years ago made such a difference, or even people that I've never met face to face who express appreciation for things that I've written. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen believes that it's his responsibility to leverage past experiences so that future researchers are positioned to succeed. He hopes to give back to others entering the field, not just through ideas, but through a spirit of openness and generosity.

Jørgen Carling  

The big project I'm working on now, on migration aspirations in West Africa, is funded by the European Research Council, which is known sort of, as the most prestigious funder in in Europe. And there's now a cottage industry of commercial companies advising people on how to succeed in getting a grant like that, and after I first failed in my first attempt and succeeded my second, I wrote a long essay on the experience and what I thought I'd learned from both the failure and the success. And so many people afterwards have come and thanked me for that as a service to other researchers and said that it's helped them in their own journey towards that kind of grant. Actually, migration studies is a good field, in that respect. There's a lot of generosity and less sort of sharp elbowed competitiveness, I think, than in many other fields. I'm grateful to be part of that tradition, and I hope to be remembered for also contributing to it.

Maggie Perzyna  

Our guests today will unpack how aspirations, abilities, and opportunities intertwine to shape the many ways people imagine movement or imagine home. You've already met Jørgen Carling. He's joined by Kerilyn Schewel, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and co-director of the Duke program on climate resilience and mobility. Her research examines why people stay and how life goals, family ties and social constraints shape that decision. Thank you both for joining me today!

Jørgen Carling  

Thank you. 

Kerilyn Schewel  

Thanks for having us. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen, you've spent much of your career studying what happens before people move, the ideas, emotions, and decisions that lead up to migration. When you talk about migration aspirations, what do you mean?

Jørgen Carling  

So, I mean the thoughts and feelings that people have about potentially migrating in the future. And migration aspirations has become the most established term for that, but to me, it's also sort of a placeholder term for more nuanced differences that I'm still trying to figure out, which are much more complex than simply a question of wanting to stay or wanting to leave. As we're trying to figure out the nuances of that, migration aspirations works as a good placeholder. Migration aspirations is about what people would prefer to do, and then the question is, if they want to move, are they able to do so?

Maggie Perzyna  

Kerilyn, your work picks up that thread but focuses on why people stay. What drew you to study immobility, and how does your perspective build on Jørgen's idea of involuntary immobility?

Kerilyn Schewel  

So, I love migration theory. When I first entered grad school and started studying migration, I was kind of struck by the fact that our migration theories couldn't explain a pretty fundamental social fact, which is that most people don't move. So, a lot of our migration theories have focused so much on explaining why people migrate, but when you apply them to the real world, they don't really explain why the vast majority of humanity still lives in the country in which they were born. And so, I found that quite remarkable, that most people aren't moving. And Jørgen's work, and particularly his concept of involuntary immobility, and making this distinction between a desire to move and the ability to move was the first framework I really encountered that helped explain that reality, that helped explain a form of immobility that we weren't taking seriously enough at that point. But involuntary immobility alone can't explain, you know, why so many people are staying. For example, we have Gallup world poll data, which is basically the best measure we have of migration aspirations at the global level. Then it asks people this question, you know, ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you migrate permanently to another country? And 85% of the world's population says they wouldn't migrate, even if they, you know, had the actual opportunity to do so. So, I tried to dig into, well, what are the factors that retain and repel people? And as I've dug a bit deeper, realized it's not just that everybody's making this simple choice between, do I stay or do I go? You know, migration decision making is much more complex, much more layered, and I've been curious about, you know, what does it mean to not want to move, especially when there's so much to gain from migration?

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen, you make a clear distinction between the aspiration to migrate and the ability to do it. Why do you find that difference so important?

Jørgen Carling  

Because actual migration presupposes having both of those. Many people misunderstand the notion of aspiration in the sense that it only applies to people who see migration as something very desirable or positive. But it could, of course, be people who see it as the lesser evil. So, people in a conflict zone, for instance. Even in this context of what's often called forced migration. You could talk about migration aspirations in the sense that a lot of people would prefer to leave rather than stay, but are then constrained by doing so, which often comes down to restrictive policy and a lack of resources.

Kerilyn Schewel  

Could I add something onto that? 

Maggie Perzyna  

Of course, please.

Kerilyn Schewel 

An article that Jørgen and I wrote together, sort of revisiting the aspiration mobility model. We mentioned this one paper by Michael Creighton, who was looking at international migration from urban and rural areas in Mexico, and he showed how, compared to urban people, rural residents are more likely to want to migrate, but they're less likely to actually realize those desires if they have them. And so, if we're trying to explain rural and urban differences in migration, if we don't separate the desire and the ability, we're actually muddling those two things. And I think that's important. In the social sciences, there's good reason for people to just focus on what people do, don't focus on what they say. You know, like people will say all kinds of things. Like, we just need to study behavior, because that's concrete, and I think that's something we wrestle with a lot in our work, is that aspirations aren't always predictive of behavior.

Maggie Perzyna  

You both study the space between wanting to move and actually moving. So, how does focusing on that space change what migration research looks like? Jørgen, let's start with you.

Jørgen Carling  

I think most importantly, perhaps it challenges the idea that migration research is about migrants. And we hear that a lot from people with good intentions who want to change the perspective, from the perspective of states and academics and so on to the perspective of the people. And I really support that shift in perspective. But that's not about changing the perspective to migrants alone. It's also about those three or four or five people behind every migrant who would like to migrate, and it's about the perspective of others in communities of origin who might personally prefer to stay, but who are connected to people who have migrated. To me, that's really the most important implication of this focus, that it challenges the notion of who are the people whose lives we study. It's not just the migrants.

Maggie Perzyna  

Kerilyn?

Kerilyn Schewel  

I agree with that very much. Looking at the communities that people leave and understanding, you know, what does life look like before a move? The amount of research that has gone into understanding these kind of origin country contexts, origin community context, that has significantly improved our understanding of what are the drivers or determinants of migration. It's shifted the focus of migration research, not just solely away from migrants themselves, as Jørgen was saying, but helped us move away from a sort of Western centric destination country perspective. And migration research more generally.

Maggie Perzyna  

Aspirations can be tricky to study. Kerilyn, you've said some people don't always have fully formed migration goals. Sometimes they haven't really thought about it. How does that uncertainty shape your research?

Kerilyn Schewel  

It's helped me move away from the assumption, when you go to talk to people about migration that they have, some, you know, clearly formed idea about whether they want to migrate or stay. I think, as migration researchers, you're thinking about migration all the time, and you can sort of forget that other people aren't. And there's some contexts where migration really is part of the social environment and people are thinking about it and aspiring for it. But there's many other contexts where that isn't quite the case, or people aren't that connected to, you know, particularly international migration. And it just hasn't really entered into their aspirational horizon. So, in my own research, I try to look at not just a desire to move or to stay, but to really understand what are people's aspirational horizons. What do people aspire for in their life? And maybe one small anecdote, just because sometimes I feel uncomfortable as a researcher, you kind of talk about, okay, these communities in Africa, and they've never considered moving. I think this is actually a very human thing, and I can give a story for my own life. When I was in high school and I was thinking about colleges - I grew up in Georgia in the southeast of the United States, and I never considered applying to a university beyond the southeast. I only applied to universities that were in my immediate region. And I knew that there was like Harvard or Stanford. I knew there were these other schools, but my aspirational horizons just didn't extend that far. And I didn't know anyone who had ever done that. Many people just are making migration decisions within their particular social bubble, you know. And I think we have more research to do on what factors shape those horizons for people. 

Jørgen Carling  

Let me just add to that. My original work on the aspiration and ability to migrate was something I did as a graduate student 25 years ago. And now I've come back to many of the same topics after concentrating on other aspects of migration research in between. And one of the things that really struck me now is the importance of this space in between clearly wanting to stay and clearly wanting to leave. Now I'm doing research in three urban areas in West Africa, which are definitely places in which most people do have this notion of the possibility of migration. So, very, very few people have never considered it or clearly don't want it. But at the other end of the scale, very few people are really determined to go and actively working towards it.

Maggie Perzyna  

That's really interesting, and it seems like there's a lot of corridors that that could apply to as well. How can studying aspirations and immobility change the way that policymakers think about migration pressures and so-called root causes?

Jørgen Carling  

It's strikingly difficult to identify sort of specific factors that imply that if policy could just change this factor, then people would prefer to stay. And I think the closest we come to that is that things that give people their faith in local futures might reduce the desire to stay. So we see for instance that corruption has an unexpectedly strong impact on migration, aspirations and more so than unemployment or poverty, for instance. And that, I think, has to do with the sense that a lot of people who experience corruption see it as sort of a more fundamental lack of avenues to a better life. Because if you're in a society where you feel that there's always going to be someone who is reaping the benefits of your efforts or creating obstacles for you to succeed that's really detrimental to your hope in building a local future. It's about how people feel, essentially about the prospects of succeeding locally more so than what their actual situation today is like.

Kerilyn Schewel  

What was really striking is that after these individual level factors, like whether you're married or your age or your education levels, the most important sort of set of retain factors related to community institutions, trust in community institutions, or the quality of local services and infrastructure. And these were more important, relatively speaking, than one's economic situation, one's health, or even social ties, as we measured it in that and so I just wanted to bring that out, to echo what Juergen was saying, because there are real policy implications there. I think when we think when we think about addressing the root causes, it's easy to kind of address to assume it's just poverty or climate change or these sort of classic push factors, when actually we need to be investing much more in sort of the health and development of local communities.

Maggie Perzyna  

Yeah, I was also thinking about trust when Jørgen was just speaking. I think both of you have alluded to the fact that people don't really fall neatly into wanting to leave or wanting to stay. Most live in between with mixed feelings. So, what does that middle space reveal about how people imagine their futures? Jørgen?

Jørgen Carling  

Part of this middle space also points to the sort of interactions between aspiration and ability, because some people who, in a way have migration aspirations, who in a way, deep down, want to leave, also see that it's not feasible or not realistic. So, they might wait for an opportunity to arise, but in the meantime, they might also consciously or subconsciously subdue that aspiration. So, one understandable psychological mechanism that might be at work is that people tend to push this aspiration a bit into the background if they see that it's not something that they can realize or alternatively relate to it in more of a passive way or waiting for or seeing which opportunities might arise.

Maggie Perzyna  

Kerilyn, any thoughts on that middle space? 

Kerilyn Schewel  

Sure, I think that middle space, it's something everybody has to navigate right the gap between what we desire for our lives and what our actual opportunities are. I think we focus a lot on young people in migration research. Young people are the most likely to want to migrate and also the most likely to actually migrate. But I think young people also are experiencing shifting aspirations, and the factors that shape what they aspire for in their life are changing quite dramatically between the period of adolescence into their 30s. And their actual opportunities and constraints that they face are also shifting quite dramatically during that time. So, I think as we focus on kind of what people imagine for their futures, bringing in more of a life course analysis at the more micro level, can help us begin to kind of disentangle how those shift over time. At a big picture level, I have a book coming out next month called Moved by Modernity, How development shapes migration in rural Ethiopia, and a core argument of that book is that contemporary development is itself a root cause of global migration. And rather than focusing on or giving sort of most of my focus to the structural drivers of migration in the modern period, I focus a lot on aspirational shifts. And argue that in many so-called developing countries, development kind of cultivates this aspiration for change and for progress and for transformation. And that is really one of the core drivers of migration desires around the world. And so when thinking about imagined futures and the social forces that shape them, there are questions about, you know, what kind of lives do we aspire for, and what kind of lives are we teaching people to aspire for, and are those realistically accessible?

Maggie Perzyna  

So, maybe just to bring things around, some final thoughts. As the field continues to evolve, Jørgen what are you most excited to see and what still weighs on your mind?

Jørgen Carling  

I'm actually really excited about the research that I'm doing right now, and this wonderful opportunity I've had of coming back to the same topic of migration aspirations and studying it really in depth, but also across three different cities in West Africa, and exploring some of these things that result from the development of migration studies over the past 25 years, including Kerilyn's work on what is it that makes people actually want to stay. What I've also become excited about is asking, first and foremost, what is it that people aspire to in life, more generally, and then see how migration fits into that. So, we've asked all of our survey respondents in West Africa the open question, what is your most important dream in life? And that turned out to be such an incredibly rich source of the data. There's 3000 statements written down exactly as people said them of what their dreams in life are. And then to see how that paints sort of a picture of what it is that people want and how migration fits into that or not. So, just about 10% of young adults mentioned migration as part of their most important dream in life. But some people did say that my most important dream is to get out of here. So, there is that relatively small group of people whose lives are really focused on elsewhere. But then there are all sorts of people who have dreams about being nurses or businessmen or caring for their children or building a house for their parents. And sometimes migration is a way to achieve those goals. And sometimes migration is an end in its own right, and sometimes migration doesn't play any role in it. But I think it's been sort of a restriction on us as migration researchers that we've, in a way, set out with migration as a starting point, and that's not how people's lives work.

Kerilyn Schewel  

Kerilyn, final thoughts, sure, from my perspective. You know, migration studies is its own subfield, with its own theories, like the aspiration ability model, with its own journals and conferences. And I would say that Europe is really the stronghold where this kind of interdisciplinary community of migration researchers are based. In the United States, the study of migration has been much more kind of siloed within discipline. So, each different discipline, there are people who study migration, you know, through a sociological lens, through an economic lens. And I think one thing that really excites me is I think that's starting to change, and I'm noticing grad students, for example, who are using the aspiration ability model. I'm sort of seeing a growing spread of interdisciplinary migration studies in the US, but at the same time, I think there is a real rigor that comes from these more disciplinary approaches to migration that can likewise inform our study of migration as it's emerged within more in the interdisciplinary European context. So, I'm really excited to follow that, and I do think that research on environmental change and migration is a space that is inevitably interdisciplinary, that's very much drawing on existing migration theory and research, but there's so much more room actually for that body of work to inform our understanding of this relationship between environmental change and migration. So, I'm also really eager and also excited to see how that conversation evolves, because research in that space is evolving so quickly.

Kerilyn Schewel  

Well, thank you both. The symbiosis of your work was really amazing to listen to today. So, I really want to thank you both for joining me and for sharing. But before I let you go, we are doing like a fun little lightning round at the end, just to keep things light and humanize all our incredible guests. So, I'm just going to ask you a couple of quick questions, and just like the first thing that pops into your head.

Maggie Perzyna  

Kerilyn, favorite book?

Kerilyn Schewel  

You know, what I think it would probably be is maybe Lonesome Dove. I mean, that's the first book that came to mind, the novel Lonesome Dove.

Maggie Perzyna  

Perfect. Jørgen?

Jørgen Carling  

I would say Factory Girls by Leslie Chan.

Maggie Perzyna  

 Okay, next question. What policy buzzword do you think should disappear? Kerilyn?

Kerilyn Schewel  

 If I had to say, maybe climate migration.

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen, do you have one? 

Jørgen Carling  

I have a problem with "impact" as a verb. And I know that sounds really pedantic but...

Maggie Perzyna  

 That's fair! 

Maggie Perzyna  

You know this and that "impacts" migration.

Maggie Perzyna  

Kerilyn, the favorite place that you've done field work or research.

Kerilyn Schewel  

 That would be a place called Adami Tullu in Ethiopia. It's where I've done most of my research, and I feel very attached to the community there.

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen?

Jørgen Carling  

My main sort of field work home is São Vicente in Cape Verde. So, that's, in a way, the obvious answer to the question, but I've also been so excited about the field work that I've done in Ghana over the past five years in the city of Tema and how easily accessible and enjoyable that was.

Maggie Perzyna  

I think their football team in Cape Verde just won, didn't they?

Jørgen Carling  

Yes, or they just qualified for the World Cup. Yeah, there you go. The second smallest country ever. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Yeah! Okay. And last question, what's one thing that we can't learn about you from your CV? Kerilyn?

Kerilyn Schewel  

 I would say that I'm a mother. I think that's a huge part of my identity that's not on my CV

Maggie Perzyna  

Jørgen?

Jørgen Carling  

I sort of became a cat person, which I'd never expected. We had a wonderful cat for two years that I really came to love and his death a couple of months ago was just unexpectedly devastating.

Maggie Perzyna  

I'm sorry, but I understand. Thank you both. Honestly, that was one of my favorite conversations we've had so far. You are both amazing.

Kerilyn Schewel  

Oh, thanks for inviting me to be part of it. I'm so happy.

Maggie Perzyna  

Thanks so much to Jørgen Carling and Kerilyn Schewel for joining me today, and thank you for listening. This episode was produced by Toronto Metropolitan University journalism student, Kristian Cuaresma, alongside executive producer Angela Glover. Special thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and CERC Migration for making this conversation possible. If you're enjoying Borders & Belonging, follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn. For more on today's conversation, check out the show notes.