This workshop is co-organised by the Center for Policy Studies, the Department of Sociology & Social Anthropology, the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations, and the Department of Gender Studies at CEU
November 17-18, 2016, CEU, Oktober 6 / 7, room 102
This workshop aims at critically engaging with migration scholarship and challenging dehistoricizing and depoliticizing discourses of ‘migration crisis’. It sets out to develop collective reflections on mobility regimes and on migrants as political actors in relation to migration-related politics and beyond. It is particularly interested in migrants’ struggles as connected to other realms of contentious political and economic activities and within broader historical contexts. It also wishes to explore the possibilities, tensions and limitations enacted by migrant solidarity and joint struggles, and their potential to efficiently contest dominant representations of migrants and mobility.
In recent years, scholarly studies focusing on migrant struggles and particularly on the way in which migrants resist and subvert increasingly marginalizing immigration and border policies have burgeoned. This development mirrors the upsurge in political mobilization of refugees, illegalized migrants and solidarity activists across the world. From the European Union and its borders to the North American and Australian contexts but also, and importantly, countries of the Global South, collective actions by and in support of refugees and migrants have multiplied and adopted a variety of forms including marches, workers and hunger strikes and occupations. This has been heralded by critical migration studies scholars as the advent of new forms of being political, where migrants, due to the challenge they pose to the territorial-bounded conception of politics, open space for politics that are no more defined in relation to the state-nation-citizen nexus.
