Call for Papers

Heritage out of Control: Inheriting Waste, Spirits and Energies

Online Workshop organized by the Empires of Memory Research Group
May 17-19, 2021

Stirring debates on what is worth preserving, what is dismissible and what needs to be dismantled, heritage has become a hotspot for political discussions as well as historical and anthropological research. Shaped by secular and religious structures of thinking that are rooted in imperial, colonial and national legacies, heritage sites have been important locations for establishing a common understanding of the past and present. It also operates as an upholder of the distinctions between the secular and the religious that are key to modern statehood. Focusing on the absences, affective dissonances and the ensuing silent consensuses produced by the materiality of heritage, we aim to destabilize the place-oriented, static and secularized notions that abound in debates on heritage. Exposing the power dynamics embedded in the spatial materiality of the secularized space of heritage, we would like to shift the focus onto the undesirables: spirits, energies and waste. The attention to the nonhuman agents affords us ways to disturb the material limits of supposed meaning-making processes and challenge the abstract public that heritage presupposes. We assert that this focus has the potential to destabilize the imposed genealogies and lineages that bolster not only the notion of heritage but also how it shapes understandings of the past, present and possible futures.

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Lived Citizenship, Uprising and Migration: Everyday Politics, Imaginaries and Contestation

Workshop organized by Hania Sobhy (MPI-MMG), Salwa Ismail (SOAS) and Nadine Abdalla (AUC) and supported by the Department Socio-Cultural Diversity, MPI-MMG
30 September – 1 October 2021, Berlin

With the first wave of the Arab Uprisings, it became apparent that new frameworks were needed for understanding the diverse experi-ences, resources and aspirations of Arab pub-lics. The unprecedented scale of collective ac-tion presented serious challenges to the status quo, and triggered major regional and global developments, including a new wave of migra-tion across the Mediterranean that remains at the forefront of European politics. With still unfolding repercussions, 2019 witnessed a second wave of the Arab uprisings with major protests in five more countries in the region. This workshop explores new ways of thinking about the everyday experiences that shape political outcomes in the Arab region and its diasporas. While many scholars have exam-ined the causes of the uprisings and the institutional arrangement and re-arrangements that followed, little research has been carried out on how the everyday realities, transforma-tions and dislocation are lived by different cat-egories of citizens. more

Re-configuring the ageing-migration nexus: towards a critical understanding of ageing and migration in the ‘global south’

Special Issue project
Editors: Dora Sampaio and Megha Amrith

Today, two thirds of the world’s older adults live in developing regions, where their numbers are growing faster than in the developed regions. In 2050, it is estimated that nearly 8 in 10 of the world’s older persons (aged 60 years old and more) will be living in developing parts of the world (UN, 2017; 2019). While existing data clearly demonstrate that the numbers of ageing individuals are expected to increase more sharply in Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, and Africa in the forthcoming decades, research agendas have remained primarily focused on ageing populations in the ‘global north’ and the socio-spatial ramifications that these demographic processes have on the ‘global south’. What is overlooked is a recognition of experiences in regions of the south that are themselves ageing and the social transformations and forms of translocal mobility that occur in conjunction. more

The Here and Now in Forced Migration: Everyday Intimacies, Imaginaries and Bureaucracies

An international workshop organized by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
22-23 October 2020

This workshop draws attention to the here and now in forced migration contexts. While a focus on the present can never be separated from the past and future of migrants’ memories, nostalgias, hopes and dreams, we recognise an analytical value that lies in this temporal idiom.

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Regulating and Experiencing Immigrant Status Transition: Comparing Entry, Settlement, and Naturalization

An international workshop co-sponsored by the MPI-MMG Department of Ethics, Law and Politics
22 May 2020 in Berlin

The distinction between immigration policies and immigrant policies has been pertinent in the field of migration studies since Tomas Hammar first made it in 1985. The former refers to the criteria used to grant immigrants entry to the territory, while the latter refers to regulations regarding immigrant rights, (permanent) settlement, and access to citizenship. Besides making the distinction, Hammar also noted later that there may be a link between these policy realms. In recent years, the nature of this link has been explored in more detail. One of the most prominent examples is Martin Ruhs’ book The Price of Rights, which suggests that while for certain high-skilled immigrants, access to the territory and to rights go together, for other categories there can be trade-offs. Anna Boucher and Justin Gest have also noted an “admission-citizenship nexus”, documenting among other things that lower naturalization rates are connected to greater labor inflows, and that higher rates are connected to non-economic forms of immigration.

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