The following eight projects are part of the ESRC's Mediterranean Migration Research Programme:

Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by boat: Mapping and documenting migratory journeys and experiences.
Dr Vicki Squire, University of Warwick
This project produces a timely and robust evidence base as grounds for informing policy interventions developed under emergency conditions. It does so by assessing the impact of such interventions on those that they affect most directly: refugees and migrants themselves.

Missing migrants and deaths at the EU’s Mediterranean border: Humanitarian needs and state obligations.
Simon Robins, University of York
This project seeks to generate data that can enable the authorities to prioritise a systematic approach to the collection of information from both migrant bodies found in the EU and from the families of missing migrants, such that bodies can be identified and families informed of deaths. The project will permit policy to be driven by an understanding of the needs of families of dead and missing migrants.

Transitory lives: An anthropological research of the migration crisis in the Mediterranean.
Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Durham University
Investigating the management of migration emergencies in the critically affected regions of south Italy and the eastern Aegean islands, this study aims to document and understand migrant subjectivities and motives behind high-risk irregular migration, to identify potential gaps in reception structures and to assess the effects of migration on receiving communities.

Transcapes: transient populations transforming the European political space.
Antonis Vradis, Loughborough University
As an unprecedented flow of refugees and migrants makes its way through the European continent, the Transcapes project aspires to move away from both a victimisation and criminalisation of this flow, asking how these transient populations challenge and rapidly transform the European political space instead.

Unravelling the Mediterranean migration crisis (MEDMIG).
Heaven Crawley, Coventry University
The research aims to better understand the dynamics of migration in the Mediterranean region by providing the first large-scale, systematic and comparative study of the backgrounds, experiences, aspirations and routes of migrants in four European countries (Italy, Greece, Malta and Turkey) gathered from 550 migrants who have recently arrived and 100 stakeholders.

EVI-MED - Constructing an evidence base of contemporary Mediterranean migrations.
Brad Blitz, Middlesex University
This project will collate statistics from across search and rescue organisations as well as national and European bodies, to track and map migrant flows and reception systems across the Mediterranean. It will also include a survey of more than 750 individual migrants across Sicily, Greece and Malta, providing an insight into profiles, routes, experiences and migration plans.

Precarious trajectories: Understanding the human cost of the migrant crisis in the central Mediterranean.
Simon Parker, University of York
This project will provide a rigorous, evidence based account of the human cost of the current Mediterranean emergency, looking at the complex migration trajectories; how different state and non-state actors can add or reduce friction to the mobility of migrants; and how conventional governmental and media representations can be qualified or challenged by giving voice to migrants as knowledge bearing subjects.

Documenting the humanitarian migration crisis in the Mediterranean.
Elspeth Guild, Queen Mary, University of London
We know little about the experiences and journeys of migrants, especially in light of migration management strategies; this project will answer key questions such as who are the migrants?; how do they make their journeys?; where do they seek to go?; what family connections do they have?; how are they governed along the way? It will involve the development of a database that offers a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative picture of migrants and the ways in which they are governed en route.