We are All Migrants from Somewhere

Alex Hartman is the co-head of the UCL Policy Lab’s work on equality and rights and an Associate Professor of Political Science. 

Alex Hartman grew up in a traditionally immigrant, working-class neighbourhood in New York, a veritable patchwork of cultures and creeds. But it was only when her family relocated to a rural community when she reached high school age, that she discovered just how formative her early years in New York had been.  

“The first time that I left New York,” she says, “it was really shocking to live in a place where people were more similar to each other, or at least that's how it appeared on the outside to an outsider.” 

“Although I loved that experience, I realised that I really missed something about the place where I had grown up, and I was curious about that." 

It was these early experiences that have driven her to an outstanding academic career, which includes work investigating the causes, consequences and politics of migration. 

Initially, driven by that early experience, Alex Hartman examined patterns of migration from the Global South to the North. But then she realised that the forces propelling migration were deeper and more complex than they seem.

“I did research on migration from North Africa to Europe,” she explains, “and part of that involves spending time in North Africa and trying to understand what the experience of people who were from that region was like when they got to Europe.”  But then she saw that “often there were people not necessarily coming to places like London or New York,” but people were moving between different parts of the Global South. “I started learning about forced displacement and humanitarian activities and the politics of those topics.”

When people outside academia read Alex Hartman’s research today, they are probably most struck by her extraordinary ability to write from a position of deep respect for the lives of those she studies. Her scholarship bears witness to the real-life experiences people’s lives.

Once again, that ability comes from practical experience as well as from scholarly training. “I worked for a legal aid program that provided support to forcibly displaced people in Cairo and Egypt,” she tells us. “And these were people from the Horn of Africa, but also from the Middle East, from Sudan, Ethiopia, Iraq. It felt like the systems that run the world had … forgotten these people. And I've been thinking about that ever since.”  

The consequences of this are that Hartman’s work goes beyond the sophisticated statistical analysis that is the mainstay of contemporary political science, and pushes us to think what it is to build a healthy and stronger society, one that places human connection and understanding at its heart. 

In part this is about making sure that her research has immediate practical value. “When I'm thinking about what kinds of data or what kinds of analysis that I want to do for a particular project or to answer a particular question. I'm always trying to think about how I can use different kinds of data together to be clearer to myself and hopefully to those people who are going to use my research. You know, what are we sure about and what are we less certain about? What do we need to learn more about?” 

And it also has enormous consequences for our deeper understanding and for our contemporary politics.

Most of all, Alex Hartman’s work shows us that migration is not a “problem” that can be “solved”.

It is, in fact, a constant in human history, and will remain so.

“We were all migrants from somewhere else in the long scale of history”, she explains. “And that’s a way of reframing a particular encounter between people in a way that emphasises the commonality that we have. One of the political things that I’m really interested in is how people can find common ground, even when the odds seem very much against that”.

Dr Alexandra Hartman is Associate Professor of Political Science

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