Mobility & Politics: Re-Theorising Skilled Migration.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Dr. Parvati Raghuram, Reader in Human Geography at the Open University, UK, presented a talk entitled “Re-Theorising Skilled Migration”.
“Skills offer one of the most important passports to mobility in the contemporary world. As a result, skilled migration has become the object of considerable empirical and policy analysis. However, theorisations of skilled migration have lagged behind policy analyses. In this presentation this lacuna is addressed by exploring three ways in which skilled migration may be theorised spatially: through comparativism, as a set of constitutive relations and as topological twists. This talk suggests that skills should be seen not as pre-given but as produced at particular spatio-temporal conjunctures. The presentation ends by asking how do these spatial analytics alter the politics of ‘migration talk’?”
Parvati Raghuram is a Reader in Human Geography at the Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University, UK. She has co-authored “Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction” (Palgrave), “The Practice of Cultural Studies” (Sage), “Gender and International Migration in Europe” (Routledge) and co-edited “South Asian Women in the Diaspora” (Berg) and “Tracing Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations” (Sage). She co-edits with Martin Geiger and William Walters the “Mobility & Politics” series for Palgrave Macmillan. Her recent interest is in the question: does studying migration always need to mean studying migrants?
The workshop was chaired by Christina Gabriel, Carleton University.