The IMISCOE Anti-Racism Working Group (ARWG) webinar series continues thanks to the MIGCITPOL Standing Committee!
Guest Speakers
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Iseult Honohan (University College Dublin)
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Tendayi Bloom (University of Birmingham)
In the past three decades, Citizenship Studies has developed into a major interdisciplinary sub-field with a truly global scope. Yet, its origins in the 1980s mainly clustered around a handful of Western European states experiencing heightened politicization around the issue of non-European immigration and integration. In this webinar, two scholars will discuss whether, despite considerable efforts to expand the field both geographically (i.e. beyond its Western core) and thematically (i.e. beyond immigrants to emigrants or non-immigrant minorities), the field is still too Eurocentric.
We identify at least two limitations in trying to move beyond Eurocentrism: First, the immigration-citizenship conundrum has not sufficiently taken into account the European colonial experience. More specifically, it has not paid enough attention to its major role in devising legal boundaries between national ‘citizens’ in the metropolis or settled in the colonies, and national ‘subjects’ who were from the most part still considered as having the nationality of the colonial state for the purpose of international law, but were for the most part deprived of citizenship rights due to their indigenousness. The conceptual and empirical interlinkages between yesterday’s indigenous subjects and todays’ immigrants may not have been sufficiently acknowledged and explored. Second, concepts that were coined in the Western European or North American context may at times lose much of their analytical power when incautiously applied to other areas of the world.
Our guest speakers will be invited to discuss these limitations to challenges to contemporary global comparative analysis. They will also be invited to offer their own diagnosis of the forces sustaining Eurocentrism and possible ways to address them. In order to join, we ask you to register first so we can have an approximate idea of how many people will join us:
The event will take place online via Cisco Webex and it is completely free! (Password: 1234)
