Gemic: seminario internazionale sulle migrazioni

Bologna – Workshop internazionale sulle migrazioni
GeMIC (7th FP) Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia UniNomade
INTERNATIONAL WORKSHO

Reconceptualizing Migration: Movements and Struggles, Facing the Global Crisis

20-21 May 2010, University of Bologna

For several years, scholars and activists from different parts of the world have been engaged in promoting critical gazes on migration as a social movement, challenging both the methodological nationalism and the traditional disciplinary borders that frame mainstream research on the issue. From this critical standpoint, migratory movements and conflicts have been reconceptualized in terms that prioritize the subjective practices, desires, expectations, and behaviors of migrants themselves. Without romanticizing migrants or their migration experiences, this perspective explores the ambivalence and contradictions of these subjective practices and behaviors, and investigates how new formations of domination and exploitation are forged within migration as well as new practices of liberty and equality. Crucial to this critical approach is thus an examination of the politics of mobility that emphasizes the subjective stakes within these struggles and clashes, which materially constitute its field. It seeks to demonstrate, in other words, how the politics of “immigration control” itself is compelled to come to terms with a politics of migration that structurally precedes and exceeds its practices of border enforcement and reinforcement. Moreover, this perspective allows for an analysis of the production of migrant “irregularity” or “illegality” not as a unilateral process of exclusion and domination managed by state and law, but as a tense and conflict-driven process, in which subjective movements and struggles of migration are an active, primary, and fundamental factor.

In this international workshop, migration scholars from various locations will pursue a critical dialogue that aspires to continue to reconceptualize migration in new directions in the face of the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and of the new emerging constellations of racism that characterize it. Inspired by a preliminary conference at Columbia University in New York City, this gathering will address the intersections of migration with questions of labor and citizenship, gender and generation, queer theory, racism and criminalization, technologies of digitalization and securitization, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, postcoloniality and “human rights.”

The programme:

20-21 May 2010, University of Bologna, Palazzo Hercolani, Strada Maggiore 45 – Aula Poeti

May 20, 2.30pm

Introduction:

Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna), The Gaze of Autonomy

May 20, 3.00pm – Panel 1

Chair: Ayça Çubukçu (European University Institute, Firenze)

Speakers:

Michael Willenbuecher (Unaffiliated researcher, Berlin)

Sebastian Sierra Bara (University of Frankfurt a.M.), Digital Borderland – Tracing the European Continent of Databases

Vassilis Tsianos (University of Hamburg), Migration control and the involvement of the arms industry in EU security policy and research. Notes on the high-tech industry of European border control

Alessandra Sciurba (University of Palermo), Fields of Force and Right to Stay

Discussant: Gigi Roggero (University of Bologna)

May 21, 9.30pm – Panel 2

Chair: Nicholas De Genova (University of Amsterdam)

Speakers:

Ayça Çubukçu (European University Institute, Firenze), On the Migration of Cosmopolitanism, and its Reverse

Rutvica Andrijasevic (Open University, UK), Gender and the Politics of Mobility

Luca Queirolo Palmas (University of Genova), Gangs in the Atlantic Latino Transnationalism, Generations and Translations

Discussant: Federico Rahola (University of Genova)

May 21, 2.30pm – Panel 3

Chair: Michael Willenbuecher (Unaffiliated researcher, Berlin)

Speakers:

Devi Sacchetto (University of Padova), Labor Migrations: Contested Terrains

Biju Mathew (Rider University and Co-founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance), Between Revolutionary Hero and Racialized Victim: Discursive Traps of Postcolonial and Modernist Visions of the Migrant Subject

Miguel Mellino (University of Napoli, L’Orientale), Postcolonial Citizenships as Allegory of Postcolonial Capitalism

Nicholas De Genova (University of Amsterdam), The Queer Politics of Migration: Reflections on “Illegality” and Incorrigibility

Discussant: Giorgio Grappi (University of Bologna)

General discussion