Thursday, September 10, 2015 witnessed the first event of the term in the lecture series: Mobility & Politics: Emerging Trends and Common Challenges in Europe and Canada.
Two international visitors presented a joint workshop entitled “Categorization and Knowledge Production in Migration Management: Transnational Perspectives”.
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 examined how category changes are informed by the interplay of politics, statistics and education.
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 gave 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 were 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.
The workshop was chaired by William Walters, Carleton University.
This Mobility & Politics Lecture Series event was 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.