Past Event

Please join us Thursday September 10th, 2015 for the first event of the term in our lecture series: Mobility & Politics: Emerging Trends and Common Challenges in Europe and Canada.

Two international visitors will present in a joint workshop entitled “Categorization and Knowledge Production in Migration Management: Transnational Perspectives”. This event will be held from 2:30-4:30pm in the Senate Room (Robertson Hall Room 608), at Carleton University. No registration is required. For more information please see below or click on the attached poster.

Kenneth Horvath (Karlsruhe, Germany): Changing Ethnic Categorizations in the EU

European government approaches to ethnic categorization have undergone important changes since the Second World War. Using the category example of ‘migration background’ – currently the dominant framing in German-speaking countries – this presentation will examine how category changes are informed by the interplay of politics, statistics and education. Drawing on discussions in Canada and the US, possible future developments and challenges that arise for European social research will be discussed.

Kenneth Horvath is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Education Karlsruhe (Germany) where he teaches qualitative and quantitative research methods. His current research focuses on migration-related educational inequalities and their political and pedagogical reproduction. Among others, Kenneth is co-editor of “An Anthology of Migration and Social Transformation”, forthcoming with Springer (December 2015).

Sabine Dini (Paris XIII, France): Migration Management and the Norm of Nationhood: Insights from Eastern Africa

During the last decade, the two leading intergovernmental organizations dealing with migration management globally, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), have implemented a “révolution identificatoire” in Eastern Africa. This presentation gives an ethnographic account of IOM and UNHCR’s production of “nationality” as both a category and defining norm. The implications of this cultivated “nationality” for local actors with respect to policy implementation, and its more general implications for citizenries will also be examined.

Sabine Dini is a PHD candidate in Political Sociology at the University of Paris 13 and currently also a Visiting Scholar at Carleton University. Her research interests are guided by the intersection of International Relations and African Studies, and she is currently engaged in explorations of state-formation and nation-building in Eastern Africa. Specifically her analysis focuses on the role of intergovernmental organizations (dealing with global migration management) within the production of stateness and the institutionalization of the nation within the state.

Our workshop will be chaired by William Walters, Carleton University.

This event in the Mobility & Politics Lecture Series is organized by Martin Geiger. It is co-sponsored and hosted jointly by the Migration & Diaspora Studies (MDS) Initiative, the Centre for European Studies (CES), the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (EURUS), the Institute of Political Economy and the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. For further information please contact the organizer at martin.geiger@carleton.ca