Reframing Global Inequalities Through Migration and Mobilities
Professor Adrian Favell FBA stands at the intersection of critical migration theory and cultural sociology, challenging conventional narratives about global mobility, integration, and inequality. As Founding Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork and recipient of a prestigious €2.5 million ERC Advanced Grant, his work fundamentally reconceptualizes how we understand human movement in an era of selective borders and persistent hierarchies.
From mapping the neo-colonial dynamics of contemporary migration systems to chronicling the evolution of Japanese contemporary art in a post-growth society, Favell's scholarship reveals the hidden architectures of power that shape who moves, who stays, and who belongs in our interconnected yet deeply unequal world.
"It is a huge and ambitious project on the root of global inequalities: on the neo-colonial relations implied in a world of hyper-selective borders which dictate who can be mobile, who is excluded, and who gets left behind."
MIGMOBS investigates how global inequalities are reproduced through the shifting classification of mobile populations, seeing "international migration" as only a narrow slice in a continuum of human and non-human mobilities.
The project charts how nation-states preserve power by selectively opening and closing mobility channels—making immigration the obsessive target of control while rendering invisible the mass mobilities of tourism, students, and business travel.
How do states extract wanted movers as "immigrants" while brutally excluding "migrants" and rendering fluid vast ranges of "mobilities"?
How do subordinate populations resist the categories, statuses, and borders imposed upon them in different regional contexts?
Professor of Social and Political Theory
Founding Director, Radical Humanities Laboratory
Leading €2.5m ERC Advanced Grant MIGMOBS project
Elected for exceptional contributions to social sciences and migration studies
Chair in Sociology and Social Theory
Director of the Bauman Institute
Led "Northern Exposure" Brexit research project
• Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po Paris
• Professor, UCLA
• Director, Centre for Global and Regional Ethnographies, Aarhus University
• Japan Foundation Abe Fellow (2006-2007)
Pioneering critical approaches to understanding migration as a mechanism of both challenging and reproducing global hierarchies. Focus on the "birthright lottery" and how citizenship at birth determines life chances.
Leading Western authority on Japanese contemporary art, chronicling its evolution through economic crisis and post-growth transformation. Author of the definitive English-language history of the Japanese art world.
Comprehensive analysis of European free movement as both utopian project and stratified reality. Examination of how EU mobility creates new forms of privilege and exclusion.
Developing new theoretical frameworks bridging neo-Weberian state-building approaches with Marxist-Foucauldian accounts of racial capitalism and population management.
Polity Press
A critical reconceptualization of integration discourse, revealing how liberal democracies use immigration management to reproduce colonial hierarchies and state power in the neoliberal era.
ECPR Press
Collection of influential essays from 1998-2014 charting the evolution of critical migration studies and the mobilities turn in social theory.
Blue Kingfisher/DAP
The first comprehensive English-language history of the Japanese art world during two decades of economic crisis and cultural transformation, examining the rise of Takashi Murakami and alternative artistic visions.
Blackwell
Groundbreaking ethnography of mobile European professionals, revealing how free movement creates new forms of privilege and cosmopolitan identity while excluding others.
Palgrave (2nd edition)
Comparative analysis of contrasting national models of immigrant integration, challenging assumptions about republican universalism and multicultural recognition.
Founded by Professor Favell in 2022, the Radical Humanities Laboratory at UCC serves as a dynamic space for critical and transformative research on pressing interdisciplinary topics in the humanities and social sciences.
Creating innovative research addressing global challenges through radical interdisciplinary approaches that challenge conventional academic boundaries.
Bringing together scholars, artists, and activists to develop new frameworks for understanding inequality, mobility, and cultural transformation.
Positioning Cork at the heart of international research networks addressing migration, climate change, and post-growth societies.
Large-scale political sociology project examining race, nation and disaffection in "ordinary" towns and cities after Brexit. Produced the documentary film From Where We Stand exploring everyday experiences of political transformation.
Examining artistic and social responses to economic stagnation and demographic decline in Japan, focusing on rural revitalization projects and alternative models of development beyond growth paradigms.
Providing fully-funded PhD positions for forced migrants from Ukraine and the Middle East as part of MIGMOBS, combining research excellence with commitment to academic sanctuary.
Developing new theoretical frameworks that expose how integration discourse perpetuates colonial power relations and racial hierarchies in contemporary liberal democracies.
Fellow (FBA) since 2021
European University Institute
Sainsbury Institute for Japanese Arts
European Migration Network
Berlin Institute Fellow 2021-22
Abe Fellow 2006-2007
"In a world of massive inequalities between nations, where citizenship at birth is the biggest determining factor of anyone's life chances, we need to fundamentally rethink how we understand migration and mobility. The challenge is not just to document inequality but to reveal the mechanisms through which it is reproduced and potentially transformed."
Professor Favell's work challenges us to see beyond the narrow frame of "immigration" to understand the full spectrum of human mobilities—from the hyper-mobile elite to the forcibly immobilized—and to recognize how these patterns both reflect and reproduce the fundamental inequalities of our time.
Through the Radical Humanities Laboratory and the MIGMOBS project, his research provides essential frameworks for understanding how borders work not just as physical barriers but as mechanisms of classification that determine human possibility in the 21st century.