David Bartram

My primary research focuses on international migration. My current work investigates the relationship between migration and happiness. In general, gaining more money doesn't make people happier, and so I'm led to wonder whether migration to a wealthier country increases happiness for migrants: I suspect that it makes many of them less happy, that economic migration is sometimes counterproductive insofar as people make great sacrifices to gain more income in the (possibly misguided) belief that the increase will make them happier. Articles published so far appear in Migration Studies, International Studies Review, Work, Employment & Society, European Societies and Social Indicators Research.

In 2011 I organized (with a colleague, Jane Pilcher) a conference to explore possibilities for sociological contributions to happiness studies. This event led me to write a review article about happiness studies, now published in Sociology Compass (link).

Current research also draws on a 3-year ESRC grant for a project titled "The UK Citizenship Process: Understanding Immigrants' Experiences", conducted with Leah Bassel (PI), Barbara Misztal and Pierre Monforte.

My first book, International Labor Migration: Foreign Workers and Public Policy (Palgrave Macmillan 2005), investigates migrant workers in Israel and Japan, using a political economy approach that emphasizes the institutional basis of different immigration policies. Articles emerging from this research have been published in International Migration Review, Politics & Society, and Ethnopolitics.

My next book, Key Concepts in Migration Studies, will be published by Sage in late 2013 (co-authored with Maritsa Poros of City College of New York and Pierre Monforte of Leicester).

My external activities relating to migration studies include membership of the governing board of RC31, the International Sociological Association's research committee on international migration. For several years I was also a co-organizer for the Ethnicity, Race and Migration network of SASE (Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics).