Lecture: Theorizing the Intersection of Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism: Rescaling Transnational Studies

Nina Glick Schiller (Professor of Social Anthropology and Director, Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Studies)

Abstract

The transnational migration paradigm has been a concerted attempt to move migration studies beyond its use of the nation-state as its primary unit of study and analysis without ignoring the continuing political potency of nation-states. The paradigm has facilitated research in historic and contemporary diasporic identities and networks. However, research on diasporas has contributed to the reassertion of an ethnic lens and methodological nationalism both inside diaspora studies and in reaction to diaspora studies.  Migrants and their descendants are pictured as contained by the boundaries of culture, community, and historic memory.  This talk builds on scholarship on relationality, simultaneity, transnational social fields, multiplicity, and locality to examine the ways in which diasporic networks shape cosmopolitan possibilities. Building on work on the rescaling of cities and the competitive cosmopolitan branding of cities , I argue for a rescaling of diasporic and transnational studies to facilitate the theorization of locality and cosmopolitanism within migration and diasporic studies.

Biography

Nina Glick Schiller is the Director of the Cosmopolitan Cultures Institute and Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is an associate of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale Germany and a senior associate of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at University of New Hampshire, USA. In more than 70 articles, chapters, reports and three books Nina Glick Schiller has developed a comparative and historical perspective on migration, transnational and diaporic processes and social relations. Her research has been conducted in Haiti, the United States, and Germany and she has worked with migrants from all regions of the globe. She has also critiqued the governmentality of regimes of truth including those reflected in research paradigms in migration, urban and health studies.

In migration and urban studies, her concern has been to explore differences of power within transnational social fields in relationship to the constitution of gender, race, class, status, poverty, the second generation, citizenship, and national identity. To foster publication from this perspective in 1992 she founded the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and edited it from 1992 to 2001. She is currently also on the boards of Social Analysis, Anthropological Theory, African Diaspora, and Focaal.

Her current book projects develop migration theory by examining the relationship between the migrant and the city. These books contest the methodological nationalism of most migration studies that remain fixed within the comparative framework of individual nation-states and state policies. The first book, Locating Migration: Rescaling Migrants and Cities, co-edited with Ayse Caglar, (Cornell 2010) examines the relationship between the scalar positioning of cities and the pathways of migrant transnationality. The second book, Pathways: Placing Migration Theory, argues that the entire debate about immigration, assimilation, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and citizenship has very little to do with how persons of migrant background actually live their lives. Approaches the varying ways persons of migrant background participate in everyday forms of cosmopolitan sociability, she highlight and links variations in these practices to the relative positionality of cities.

The event is free and open to the public.

For further information please contact Dr Parvathi Raman on pr1@soas.ac.uk or 020 7898 4434

Organiser: Centres & Programmes Office