Recognizing Migrant Emplacement: Researching Without an Ethnic Lens

IMES Podium with Prof. Nina Glick Schiller of the University of Manchester

Debate

This presentation contributes to the current efforts to develop a scholarship that does not rely on an ethnic lens to study migrant practices, socialities and identities.

At the same time Nina Glick Schiller will critique research that takes neighborhoods as the unit of study and analysis and remains confined to the examination of the ‘every day.’

She will suggest that the significance of cultural and religious identity and differences is a matter of empirical examination and that by setting aside methodological ethnicity researchers are better able to explore other forms of migrant emplacement.

Emplacement is understood as a relationship between the continuing restructuring of a city within networks of power and migrants’ efforts to settle and build networks of connection within the constraints and opportunities of a specific locality.

To illustrate this point, Glick Schiller draws from an ethnography of friendships that emerge between migrants and nonimmigrants as they forge forms of cosmopolitan social cohesion in a downsized postindustrial city.  

 

 Discussant: Prof. Mario Rutten, UvA

 Chair: Dr. Barak Kalir, UvA

Published by  AISSR