Halvar A. Kjærre: “Politics and Mobilities”
Tarje I. Wanvik: “Migration and Social Inequalities”
Halvar A. Kjærre (Department of Social Anthropology, UiB) and Tarje I. Wanvik (Department of Geography, UiB) have recently been recruited to the IMER Bergen research unit as PhD candidates.
In this seminar they will present their PhD projects. After the presentation there will also be a presentation of IMERS new webpages.
IMER Abroad: PROVIR Seminar – Precarious migrants and access to welfare: Between policy, law and practice
This workshop will discuss the legal and experienced dilemmas found in the encounter between migrants living in a legally precarious situation and the welfare state in which they reside. Participants will present ongoing empirically based research on migrants’ access to welfare in policy, law and practice in various European countries. They will also discuss the particular position of youth and children in vulnerable situations. The program is available here.
BSRS 2014 Governance to meet Global Development Challenges
Welcome to BSRS2014!
The theme for BSRS2014 is Governance to meet Global Development Challenges. The event will take place from June 23rd to July 4th 2014 at the University of Bergen. Please find information about the courses, application form and other activities at the menu to your right side.
One of the courses is and IMER/SKOK PhD course.
Read more at:
http://www.uib.no/rs/bsrs/programme/bsrs-2014-governance-to-meet-global-development-challenges
How might we think about race as a paradoxically fungible yet persistent feature of human history? This mini seminar examines race as a global phenomenon with long and diverse histories. In its migrations, conceptions of race have repeatedly been marshaled, decried, dismissed, and repurposed, reformulating conceptions of kinship and social organization along the way. From ancient empires, medieval religious conflicts, and early modern accounts of “barbarians” and “strangers” to the longue durée of colonial settlement and slavery, and from the revolutions and uprisings of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries to more recent accounts of physiognomy, eugenics, and DNA, the phenomenon of race has interacted dynamically across time and space with conceptions of caste, color, class, language, identity, law, region, and religion. Our class will begin with a conventional genealogy of race as arising from the age of Atlantic Revolutions, the slave trade, and scientific thinking in Europe and the United States before complicating our understandings of the phenomenon as one shaped over centuries of contact and interchange. Our second session will examine a longer history of race and caste in relation to Iberian colonization of the East and West Indies and our third session will investigate race and the littoral in Indian Ocean studies. Registration deadline is August 8th, 2014.
More info:
http://www.uib.no/skok/77000/phd-kurs-rase-migrasjon-og-slektskap
http://www.uib.no/en/skok/77008/graduate-course-race-migration-and-kinship
PROVIR closing conference: “Exceptional welfare: Dilemmas in/of irregular migration”
Wednesday 19th of November
Venue: Det Akademiske Kvarter
18.00-19.30: Letter to the king
Film by Hisham Zaman
Letter to the King portrays five people on a day trip from a refugee camp to Oslo, a welcome change in an otherwise monotonous life. But we soon realize that each and every one of them has an agenda for their trip. All five will make decisive choices on this day, as they discover happiness, humiliation, love or fulfill a long-awaited revenge. The five stories are tied together by a letter, written by eighty-three year old Mirza. Mirza wants to hand over the letter to the King personally.
19.30-21.00: Mediating irregular migration
Researchers, artists, authors, journalists and others contribute to the proliferation of images of the lives, and deaths, of those who migrate without proper authorization from the state. While stereotypical accounts of victims/criminals proliferate in mainstream media – (counter) representations that challenge such stereotyping also exist. The speakers in this panel discussion have all participated in producing and/or analysing images of irregular migration. Taking as their point of departure the film “Letter to the King”, they will discuss the poetics and politics of mediating irregular migration. What (im)possibilities does such mediation offer for current border struggles?
Plenary panel discussion with:
Mehmet Aktas, co-producer and scriptwriter, Letter to the king
Shahram Khosravi, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm
Synnøve N. Bendixsen, Post-doctoral fellow PROVIR and Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen
Film and panel discussion organized in cooperation with Studentersamfunnet i Bergen (http://samfunnet.sib.no/)
Thursday 20th of November
Venue: Faculty of Law, Magnus Lagabøtes plass 1, University of Bergen
09.30-10.00: Tea, coffee and registrations
10.00-10.15: Welcome address
10.15-11.45: Precarious inclusion: Provision of welfare to irregular migrants in Norway
Presentation of PROVIR research findings by
Christine M. Jacobsen, Karl Harald Søvig, Synnøve Bendixsen, Andrea Sussman and Marry-Anne Karlsen
11.45-12.00: Coffee break
12.00-13.00: Care Beyond Welfare?
Key note lecture by Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College (US)
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14.00-16.00: Workshops
16.00-16.15: Coffee break
16.15-17.15: Wrongs, Rights and Regularization
Key note lecture by Linda Bosniak, Distinguished Professor of Law, Rutgers School of Law–Camden (US)
19.00: Conference dinner
Nøsteboden
Friday 21st of November
Venue: Faculty of Law, Magnus Lagabøtes plass 1, University of Bergen
09.15-10.15: Limiting Health Care as a Tool of Immigration Policy: Ethnographic Insights into Deservingness and Responses by Civil Society
Key note lecture by Heide Castañeda, Associate Professor and Graduate Director, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida (US)
10.15-10.30: Coffee break
10.30-12.30: Workshops
12.30-13.30: Lunch
13.30-15.30: Excepted, excluded or precariously included? Dilemmas in/of irregular migration
Roundtable discussion by PROVIR research team and international partners:
Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Deputy Director of Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford (UK)
Milena Chimienti, Professor, University of Applied Science Western Switzerland – Social Work, Haute Ecole Fribourgeoise de Travail Social (HETS) (Switzerland)
Henriette Abbing, (Emiratus) Professor of Health Law, University of Utrecht (the Netherlands)
Christine M. Jacobsen, Professor, PROVIR project leader and Director of Center for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen (Norway)
Karl Harald Søvig, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Bergen (Norway)
Workshop Porgram:
Download workshop program here
Film and panel discussion on the dilemmas of mediating irregular migration
Wednesday 19th of November
Venue: Tegleverket, Det Akademiske Kvarter, Bergen
18.00-19.30: Letter to the king
Film by Hisham Zaman
Letter to the King portrays five people on a day trip from a refugee camp to Oslo, a welcome change in an otherwise monotonous life. But we soon realize that each and every one of them has an agenda for their trip. All five will make decisive choices on this day, as they discover happiness, humiliation, love or fulfill a long-awaited revenge. The five stories are tied together by a letter, written by eighty-three year old Mirza. Mirza wants to hand over the letter to the King personally.
19.30-21.00: Mediating irregular migration
Researchers, artists, authors, journalists and others contribute to the proliferation of images of the lives, and deaths, of those who migrate without proper authorization from the state. While stereotypical accounts of victims/criminals proliferate in mainstream media – (counter) representations that challenge such stereotyping also exist. The speakers in this panel discussion have all participated in producing and/or analysing images of irregular migration. Taking as their point of departure the film “Letter to the King”, they will discuss the poetics and politics of mediating irregular migration. What (im)possibilities does such mediation offer for current border struggles?
Plenary panel discussion with:
Mehmet Aktas, co-producer and scriptwriter, Letter to the king
Shahram Khosravi, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm
Synnøve N. Bendixsen, Post-doctoral fellow PROVIR and Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen
Film and panel discussion is organized by IMER Bergen in cooperation with Studentersamfunnet i Bergen (http://samfunnet.sib.no/) and is part of the PROVIR-project’s closing conference.
Precarious inclusion: Provision of welfare to irregular migrants in Norway
The IMER Bergen-project Provision of welfare to irregular migrants (PROVIR) will present its research findings at this open event.
PROVIR combined legal and anthropological approaches to investigate the complex relationship between law, institutional practice, and irregular migrants’ lived experience. The research project aimed to cast light on living conditions and access to welfare of irregularized migrants.
You can find more information about the project at PROVIRs website: http://rokkan.uni.no/sites/provir/
Date: November 20th
Time: 10.00 to 11.45
Venue: Auditorium 4, Faculty of Law, University of Bergen
The populist radical right has emerged as the spearhead of a larger renationalization process directed against positions of global and European integration. Based on anthropological fieldwork in the postindustrial towns of Doncaster (South Yorkshire, UK) and the Hungarian town of Ózd in 2015, the paper examines the various historical, material and socio-economic factors in the rise of Ukip (United Kindom Independence Party) and the extreme right-wing Jobbik (Movement for a Better Future).
In their politics of fear, minorities and migrants are marked as posing cultural-religious threats to communal harmony and the nation-state. Through participant observation and interviews with Ukip and Jobbik politicians and supporters, the paper examines how knowledge about ‘threatening others’ is produced, circulated and contested.
Dr. Cathrine Thorleifsson holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (2012). Her chief theoretical interests lie in anthropological approaches to the study of nationalism, migration, borders and xenophobia.
Welcome! A light lunch will be served.
About the Seminar series:
Migration responses
Debating the current refugee crisis in Europe
The IMER Bergen Seminar series for the spring of 2016 will discuss a wide range of responses in the wake of the current migration crisis. How can the theoretical and empirical research currently being conducted on migration, ethnic relations, peace and conflict contribute to understanding the multi-faceted landscape of politics, boundaries and everyday lives of the refugee crisis?
Illustration: Wallpapercave
Hip hop music and the forging of civic bonds among minority youth in Norway
A vast body of research documents that media coverage of ethnic minorities in Norway is systematically imbalanced and problem oriented, which in turn engenders a sense of exclusion. At the same time, hip hop music and artists are today regular fixtures in various media formats, and a genre that comprises a number of prominent performers of multi-cultural background.
Set against the backdrop of the exclusionary effects of news media representations, this interview study of a group of minority youth makes evident that mass mediated hip hop music is for them taken to entail public representation of minority experiences and sensibilities that engender a sense of democratic inclusion.
By combining recognition theory and reception theory, Nærland shows how hip hop-related media coverage is experienced to involve a positive affirmation of minority identity that also contributes to the formation of civic identity and affinities. The study argues that musical media events constitute ‘moments of recognition’ where dynamics of recognition is intensified.
Nærland further argues that recognition theory makes up a valuable supplementary framework for our theoretical understanding of the civic dimensions of media reception, and the role of popular music therein.
Welcome! A light lunch will be served.
About the Seminar series:
Migration responses
Debating the current refugee crisis in Europe
The IMER Bergen Seminar series for the spring of 2016 will discuss a wide range of responses in the wake of the current migration crisis. How can the theoretical and empirical research currently being conducted on migration, ethnic relations, peace and conflict contribute to understanding the multi-faceted landscape of politics, boundaries and everyday lives of the refugee crisis?
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) work closely with refugees by providing services and assistance. However, refugees might also be subjected to misconduct by NGOs. In such a scenario, how can NGOs be held accountable for wrongful acts?
For this IMER lunch seminar, Marianne Nerland from the Faculty of Law at UiB will present preliminary findings from her PhD project which explores recourses available to refugees seeking justice against NGOs. By drawing on interviews conducted with refugees as well as aid workers in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, Marianne will argue that there are serious legal obstacles that refugees face when wanting to file complaints against NGOs. This case highlights the need for an enhanced structure for NGO accountability in refugee camps.
A light lunch will be served! All welcome!
Marianne Nerland is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, UiB