Calendar

May
26
Tue
IMER lunch seminar: Cindy Horst – Active citizenship in culturally and religiously diverse societies. @ UNI Rokkan centre (6 etg)
May 26 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Active citizenship in culturally and religiously diverse societies.
In debates on citizenship in Europe, the need for active participation  among citizens is increasingly stressed. But do normative ideas of what active citizenship is, reflect people’s lived experiences in present-day Europe? While the low electoral participation of young people is often highlighted as an indication of reduced civic participation, various studies show increased social media use leads to increased political and social debates and mobilization. And while politicians often lament the lack of civil-political engagement among immigrants particularly, many new citizens volunteer, work as activists, take up political causes, or set up associations in both their countries of residence and origin. In Europe’s culturally and religiously diverse societies, citizens have different frameworks for how they act and interact with their close and distant surroundings. The ACT project studies this diversified citizen participation through empirical data collection on (local, national and transnational) active citizenship in neighbourhoods in Oslo and Copenhagen.

Skjermbilde 2015-02-17 kl. 22.33.04Cindy Horst is Research Director and Research Professor in Migration and Refugee Studies at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Her current research interests include: mobility in conflict; diaspora; humanitarianism; refugee protection; (transnational) civic engagement; and theorizing on social transformation.

Download poster here

Jun
23
Tue
Boklansering: Eksepsjonell velferd? Irregulære migranter i det norske velferdssamfunnet @ Will soon be available
Jun 23 @ 12:00 am – 2:00 pm

Redigert av Christine Jacobsen, Synnøve Bendixsen, Karl Harald Søvig

omsl.PMTO-2Irregulære immigranter har på noen områder full tilgang til velferdsytelser, men på mange områder er tilgangen svært begrenset enten i form av rettsregler eller andre barrierer. Denne antologien undersøker forholdet mellom rettslig rammeverk, institusjonell praksis og hvordan irregulære migranter selv erfarer sin situasjon. 
I salg fra 09. juni 2015 for 399 kroner

Med en unik kombinasjon av juridisk og antropologisk blikk, går boken regelverket nærmere i sømmene, drøfter gatebyråkraters utfordringer og hverdagslivet til irregulære migranter og deres barn.

Hvilke regelverk får konsekvenser for irregulære migranters levevilkår? Hvordan blir dette regelverket forstått og etterfulgt av gatebyråkrater? Og hvordan blir hverdagslivet til irregulære migranter og deres barn påvirket av regelverket og dets fortolkning?

Denne boken er aktuell for velferdsprofesjoner som møter irregulære migranter som en del av sin yrkesutøvelse. Både leger, sykepleiere, helsesekretærer, lærere, helsesøstre, skolerådgivere, sosialarbeidere, sosionomer og barnevernspedagoger vil ha god nytte av Eksepsjonell velferd? Irregulære migranter i det norske velferdssamfunnet. Boken retter seg også mot frivillige organisasjoner som jobber med ulike aspekter ved migranters situasjon i Norge og andre som er engasjert i temaet.

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!