Calendar

Sep
25
Fri
EMERGING URBANITIES LUNCH SEMINAR: Hans Sagan – The role of urban space in protest policing. @ UNI Rokkan Centre (6 etg)
Sep 25 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

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Political protest is an increasingly frequent occurrence in urban public space. During protests, urban space transforms according to special regulatory circumstances abrogating normal laws. Territorial control is central to securitization of urban space. Protest is disruptive of urban spatial relations, so law enforcement considers it a threat conflated with crime and terrorism. The means to achieve spatial control vary by mode of protest policing, which are products of dominant socioeconomic models of society, influenced by local policing culture and historical context. Spatial tactics of control are outgrowths of the militarization of policing and the securitization of urban space. Protest policing innovation under neoliberalism has led to new modes of tactical spatial engagement, working to strategically nullify political dissent through manipulation of urban space. This has significant consequences for urban design and emergent urban form, particularly through the professional practice of CPTED, or crime prevention through environmental design.

sagan portrait Hans Sagan holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of California – Berkeley. His recent work investigates the role of urban space in protest policing. He teaches architecture and urbanism at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Sep
30
Wed
Emerging Urbanities Seminar: Susanne Wessendorf and Thomas Hylland Eriksen – Pioneer migrants in a super-diverse context @ Uni Rokkansenteret (6 etg)
Sep 30 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Susanne Wessendorf: Pioneer migrants in a super-diverse context

Urban areas in Europe and beyond have seen significant changes in patterns of immigration, leading to profound diversification. This diversification is characterized by the multiplication of people of different national origins, but also differentiations regarding migration histories, religions, educational backgrounds, legal statuses and socio-economic backgrounds. This ‘diversification of diversity’ is now commonly described as ‘super-diversity’. Despite an increasing number of studies looking at how people live together in such super-diverse contexts, little is known about new patterns of immigration into such contexts. What are the newly emerging countries of origin which add to the diversification of already super-diverse areas? Where do recent migrants from unusual source countries, who cannot draw on already existing migrant or ethnic ‘communities’, find support? And what kinds of social networks do they form? This paper discusses pathways of settlement among recently arrived migrants from non-traditional countries of origin in the London Borough of Hackney. Drawing on earlier migration literature and the notion of ‘pioneer migration’, the paper addresses the challenges of analysing increasingly fragmented migration stories and pathways of settlement in super-diverse contexts.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: The tension between superdiversity and cultural reproduction

From a bird’s eye perspective, Alna borough in eastern Oslo definitely looks superdiverse. Scores of languages are spoken in its population of 40,000, and its inhabitants come from about as many countries. Yet at the local level, social and cultural reproduction takes place to a great extent at the ethnic or community level. As one of our informants says, ‘I sometimes feel as though I am in Pakistan’. Had it not been for the strong presence of the Norwegian state, the suburb would have resembled the plural societies described in the mid-20th century by Furnivall and Smith, where ethnic groups, like pearls on a necklace, lead parallel lives but meet in the marketplace. How comprehensive is the influence of the state; in what ways does diversity in public affect the private sphere, and what are the main elements in the cultural reproduction of minority groups?

Oct
13
Tue
EMERGING URBANITIES LUNCH SEMINARS: Anouk De Koning -Echoes of race in Amsterdam @ UNI Rokkansenteret, (6etg)
Oct 13 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Echoes of race in Amsterdam

Skjermbilde 2015-08-25 kl. 19.53.36In this talk, I will discuss how racialized discourses on multicultural failure and the trouble with the children of migrants is taken up and contested in multicultural Amsterdam. Like in other Western European countries, multiculturalism backlash discourses have dominated public debates in the Netherlands since the 1990s. I ask how people who are framed as part of the problem engage the moral imperatives of such backlash discourses and the anxieties they broadcast. Amsterdam’s Diamantbuurt provides a good vantage point for such an exploration since the neighbourhoods’ unruly Moroccan-Dutch young men have played an important role in Dutch backlash discourses. How do Moroccan-Dutch Diamantbuurt residents, who are closely identified with these iconic bad guys, negotiate the dominant narrative regarding their neighbourhood? This article demonstrates that for these residents, the anxieties articulated in backlash discourses become the grounds for an anxious grappling with abjectness and identification.

Skjermbilde 2015-08-25 kl. 19.53.23Anouk de Koning is assistant professor in Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is the author of Global Dreams: Class, Gender and Public Space in Cosmopolitan Cairo (AUC Press, 2009) and, with Rivke Jaffe, Introducing Urban Anthropology (Routledge, 2016).

 

A light lunch will be served

Nov
10
Tue
CANCELED: Emerging Urbanities Lunch Seminar: Håvard Haarstad – More information about eventual replacement will be available soon. @ UNI Rokkan centre (6 etg)
Nov 10 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

CANCELED  More infoermation about eventual repacements will be available sook

 

Dec
15
Tue
Emerging Urbanities Lunch Seminar: Bjørn Bertelsen – Predatory security: Reshaping the city and the state in Mozambique @ UNI Rokkan centre (6 etg)
Dec 15 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Predatory security: Reshaping the city and the state in Mozambique

Notions and practices of security colonise both state and urban contexts across Africa. Arguably, these notions and practices are also integral to wider global political formations where urban formations in Africa are often cast as pre-figuring the shape of future global cities more generally. Based on fieldworks in the Mozambican cities of Maputo and Chimoio, this paper sees security there as related to violent crime and capital accumulation in ways that undermine policy-oriented representations of security provision as solely undertaken by state police supplemented by neoliberal assemblages of security firms. Rather, and more specifically, the paper shows how security is not only subjected to a spatialized logic of race and social control but also renders violence – in all its forms – central to its exercise and cosmologies. This point will be emphasised by analysing how various forms of policing must be understood beyond the security-development nexus. These forms of policing increasingly involve a gradual emergence of what I call ‘predatory security’ that is central to violent modes of capital accumulation that shape African urban landscapes as well as define the contours of the state. The paper suggests that as a configuration of accumulative violence such predatory security has consequences for how we should approach calls for rights to the city as well as the state in urban African orders and beyond.

Bjørn_enge_bertelsen_pressebilde_UiB_mars_2010Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, associate professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, has researched issues such as state formation, violence, poverty and rural-urban connections in Mozambique since 1998. Bertelsen has published extensively internationally and is publishing the monograph Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture and Power in Mozambique (Berghahn Books, 2016) and has co-edited the anthologies Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval (with Bruce Kapferer, Berghahn Books, [2009] 2012) and Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, ca. 1850 to 1950 (with Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland, Berghahn Books, 2015).

Feb
9
Tue
IMER lunch seminar series Migration responses: Cathrine Moe Thorleifsson (UiO) – Nationalist responses to the crisis in Europe: Old and New Hatreds @ Sosiologisk institutt, ground floor
Feb 9 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

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.

Cathrine Moe ThorleifssonDr. 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?

Feb
23
Tue
IMER lunch seminar series Migration responses – Torgeir Uberg Nærland (UiB): Recognition through reception @ Sosiologisk institutt, ground floor
Feb 23 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

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.

Torgeir NærlandNærland 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?

Jan
16
Tue
Lunch seminar: Birthday parties as a test of belonging in Norway @ Lauritz Meltzers hus (SV-bygget), room 212
Jan 16 @ 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

Kicking off a new semester with IMER lunch seminars, our first seminar this year is building on exciting fieldwork from Bergen. Hilde Danielsen from Uni Research Rokkansenteret is giving a presentation about the symbolic value of birthday parties in contemporary Norway.

Danielsen argues that birthday celebrations have become more than a private family matter, and are increasingly seen as a socially charged question in Norwegian society. Many parents with and without migration background, as well as teachers and other actors, claim that birthday parties have the potential to create social inclusion. They are especially concerned that children with migrant background should celebrate and attend. Celebrating birthdays has seemingly become one of the litmus tests of whether an immigrant individual or an immigrant group is integrated into Norwegian society.

Note the place: Lauritz Meltzers hus (SV-bygget), room 212.

As usual, a light lunch will be served. All are welcome!

Apr
12
Thu
Lunch seminar: Diaspora Mobilization – Syrian Activism in the West @ Meeting room at 2nd floor, Adm. org
Apr 12 @ 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

In recent years, a large number of Syrian refugees have settled in Europe. In the media, most of  the debate concerning these refugees has been about how they impact their host societies. But how does this large Syrian diaspora impact politics in Syria itself?

For this IMER lunch seminar, we will be joined by Amany Selim and Espen Stokke, PhD candidates at sociology and comparative politics at UiB. They both do research projects where they explore the engagement of Syrian diaspora activists, and how these activists try to make a difference in the homeland. With their work on the Syrian case, they are hoping to contribute to the growing body of literature that attempts to bridge social movement theory and diaspora politics.

In the presentation, Selim and Stokke will give a brief overview of the field: What do we know about the activism of the Syrian diaspora? They will also present their own projects, and what they wish to add to the field.

Oct
18
Thu
IMER Lunch Seminar: Staying in Norway or Staying in the Closet? Sexual Orientation and Refugee Status in Norway @ Sampol, Seminar Room, 2nd Floor
Oct 18 @ 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm

If a LGBTI person can “stay in the closet” in the country of origin, should she then be denied asylum as a refugee? This is currently a thorny issue for several European countries, when facing asylum seekers who apply for protection on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. For this IMER seminar, Andrea Grønningsæter from the faculty of law at UiB will discuss how this is currently practiced in Norway.

Research has shown that that LGBTI people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex people) often face specific legal and procedural challenges when applying for refugee status. In a number of jurisdictions, including Norway, LGBTI asylum seekers have been denied refugee status with reference to the fact that they can abstain from behavior that may result in a risk of persecution. A gay person can live as a gay within the confines of the home, for example, but not on the streets – and may thus not be granted protection. It is then concluded that the requirement in refugee law of establishing a ‘well-founded fear’ of persecution is not fulfilled, because concealment will mean that the asylum seeker is not revealed to potential persecutors.

In 2012 the Norwegian Supreme Court considered the right to refugee status based on sexual orientation (Rt. 2012 s. 494). In the court’s decision it was stated that a gay person may not be required to hide their sexual orientation in the country of origin to avoid persecution. In cases where it is concluded that the asylum seeker will choose to conceal their sexual orientation, the court established a step-by-step approach for assessing whether the asylum seeker is entitled to refugee status.

For her PhD project, Grønningsæter looks at how the approach that was established by the Supreme Court in 2012 for assessing asylum cases based on sexual orientation or gender identity is interpreted by the courts and the immigration authorities. She explores how the courts and immigration authorities establish the asylum seeker’s reason for concealment, as well as how concepts such as ‘being open’ or ‘discreet’ about sexual orientation or gender identity is understood.

A light lunch will be served. Welcome!

Andrea Grønningsæter is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, Bergen University.