About MCSA
What Guides Us
The mission, vision and principles that shape how MCSA works.
Our mission
MCSA works to ensure that migrants can take part in citizen science and contribute to the knowledge that research produces. We bring together academic researchers, field experts and people who are not academic scientists — including migrants themselves — so that knowledge is built with the communities where migrants live and, where relevant, in their countries of origin.
MCSA supports citizen scientists through training and education, and creates spaces for people to share knowledge, learn from one another and take part in scientific work. We aim to build an environment of openness, respect and inclusion, where people from many different backgrounds can contribute to science.
MCSA sees migrants not simply as research subjects or beneficiaries, but as contributors, knowledge holders, citizen scientists, researchers and organizers — people who help shape what research asks and how it is done. Through this approach, MCSA works to strengthen the connection between scientific expertise and community knowledge, and to recognize the contribution that migrants make to science and to the communities in which they live.
Our vision
MCSA sees citizen science as a space for asking important questions about how society is organized: Who gets to produce knowledge? Whose knowledge is valued? Who participates in research? Who has a say in what research asks and how it is done? We seek to strengthen the participation of migrants in these processes — including migrant women and gender minorities, whose experiences and perspectives have often received limited recognition.
Our vision is grounded in a critical understanding of the Eurocentric, Western-centered and androcentric traditions that have shaped scientific knowledge and institutions. We work to open greater space for perspectives and experiences that have historically been overlooked, and for a broader understanding of what counts as knowledge and who can contribute to producing it.
MCSA's work centers on migrants, while recognizing that this includes people with very different experiences — refugees, people seeking protection, displaced communities and other underrepresented groups. We do not treat these as a single, generic category. Each group faces distinct barriers to taking part in research and public life, and MCSA seeks to respond to those differences rather than obscure them. Our approach is intersectional: gender, cultural background, legal status and social position all shape who is included and who is left out.
We envision a scientific community shaped by diversity, participation, openness and respect — one that recognizes migrants as people who contribute knowledge, experience and ideas to research, and that helps build a more equitable, just and gender-responsive society.
Work hand-in-hand with MCSA
Let us work together to change how science includes the people it concerns. Let science, society and the rest hear our voices.