Calendar

Apr
25
Fri
Deadline: Call for paper proposals to PROVIR closing conference
Apr 25 @ 12:00 pm

Closing conference PROVIR

“Exceptional welfare: Dilemmas in/of irregular migration”
How do states respond to the physical presence and needs of people it officially has excluded? To what extent do international human rights provide protection? How does migration control and welfare policy affect irregular migrants’ experiences and subjectivities?

Physically present, but legally excluded, irregular migrants’ present societies with particular dilemmas relating to both sovereignty and human suffering. European countries increasingly involve welfare services in migration control, either by restricting access, or by using welfare services to detect/expose irregular migrants. This raises important questions concerning not only how migrants’ legal status influences their capacity to access services, but also the practical and ethical implications for service providers. Furthermore, it challenges the extent to which human rights actually limit the exclusionary powers of states and as such whether human rights are viable outside the confines of citizenship.

Provision of Welfare to Irregular Migrants (PROVIR) will be organizing its closing conference at the University of Bergen, 19th – 21th of November 2014. As an interdisciplinary project, the PROVIR research group and its international partners have combined a legal and social science approach to the provision of welfare to ‘irregular migrants’ in Norway, and comparatively in Europe, looking particularly at health care and education. The aim of the project has been to investigate the complex relationship between law, institutional practice, and migrants’ lived experience.

The closing conference aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines who are interested in the interplay between migration control and welfare policy. At the conference, findings from the PROVIR-project will be presented by the research team. In addition to presentations by key note speakers, the PROVIR research team also welcomes papers to be presented at workshops. We especially invite contributions addressing:

1) Irregular migrants’ legal situation regarding access to welfare provisions, either in national or international law.

2) Institutional practices and responses by service providers.

3) Migrants’ experiences, agency and embodiment.

We welcome both theoretical and empirical ventures into these questions, and papers may combine the aforementioned issues with interdisciplinary approaches. We particularly encourage papers exploring issues related to health, education and children. Paper proposals (maximum 300 words) can be submitted until the 25th of April 2014. Please include a short bio with the abstract. Conference registration deadline is 1st of October.

More information about the PROVIR-project is available at http://rokkan.uni.no/sites/provir/

Jun
22
Sun
Bergen research summer school @ University of Bergen
Jun 22 – Jul 4 all-day

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

Aug
20
Wed
SKOK seminar/PhD course: Race, Migration and kinship 20.-22. August 2014 @ Ida Bloms hus
Aug 20 – Aug 22 all-day

2713780-561172-human-tracks-return-journey_3How 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

Oct
1
Wed
Deadline: Registration for PROVIR Closing Conference
Oct 1 @ 2:00 pm

PROVIR closing conference: Registration deadline 01.10.2014:

Conference registration deadline is 1st of October. Send abstract and registration details to Marry-Anne.Karlsen@uni.noMore information about the PROVIR-project is available at http://rokkan.uni.no/sites/provir/ To register and pay registration fee, please use the following link: https://provir.hoopla.no/sales/#1609368930/

Closing conference PROVIR: “Exceptional welfare: Dilemmas in/of irregular migration”

How do states respond to the physical presence and needs of people it officially has excluded? To what extent do international human rights provide protection? How does migration control and welfare policy affect irregular migrants’ experiences and subjectivities?Physically present, but legally excluded, irregular migrants’ present societies with particular dilemmas relating to both sovereignty and human suffering. European countries increasingly involve welfare services in migration control, either by restricting access, or by using welfare services to detect/expose irregular migrants. This raises important questions concerning not only how migrants’ legal status influences their capacity to access services, but also the practical and ethical implications for service providers. Furthermore, it challenges the extent to which human rights actually limit the exclusionary powers of states and as such whether human rights are viable outside the confines of citizenship.

Provision of Welfare to Irregular Migrants (PROVIR) will be organizing its closing conference at the University of Bergen, 19th – 21th of November 2014. As an interdisciplinary project, the PROVIR research group and its international partners have combined a legal and social science approach to the provision of welfare to ‘irregular migrants’ in Norway, and comparatively in Europe, looking particularly at health care and education. The aim of the project has been to investigate the complex relationship between law, institutional practice, and migrants’ lived experience.

The closing conference aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines who are interested in the interplay between migration control and welfare policy. At the conference, findings from the PROVIR-project will be presented by the research team. In addition to presentations by key note speakers, the PROVIR research team also welcomes papers to be presented at workshops. The topics adressed will be:

  • Irregular migrants’ legal situation regarding access to welfare provisions, either in national or international law.
  • Institutional practices and responses by service providers.
  • Migrants’ experiences, agency and embodiment.

PROGRAM:

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

The phenomenon of irregular migration is inextricably linked to its forms of mediation. 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:

Hisham Zaman, Director (To be confirmed)

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

10.30-13.00:   Workshops

13.00-14.00:   Lunch

14.00-16.00:   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:

Skjermbilde 2014-09-09 kl. 08.49.18

Skjermbilde 2014-09-09 kl. 08.49.32

 Download  workshop program here

Feb
17
Tue
IMER Lunch: Randi Gressgård – Plural policing and the safety–security nexus in urban governance @ UNI Rokkan centre (6 etg)
Feb 17 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Plural policing and the safety–security nexus in urban governance

Based on a study of policy frames in urban politics in Sweden, Malmö in particular, this article discusses the safety–security nexus in urban governance. It argues that perceived safety figures as an index of order and integration, and security becomes part and parcel of an expanded cohesion agenda which chain-links criminal justice, immigration control and civic integration. The expanded cohesion agenda in urban governance involves plural urban policing enabled by partnership agreements between the police and local authorities. The article demonstrates how force-based, pre-emptive crime-fighting is intertwined with preventative empowerment programmes; the ‘will to power’ is embedded in ‘the will to empower’. The preferred solution to social problems is extended force-based policing in combination with more police involvement in ‘social’ governance. It is argued that the expanded social cohesion agenda works to ‘criminalize’ specific subpopulations by replacing ‘social’ welfare politics with crime prevention programmes. Under an expanded cohesion agenda, crime prevention has less to do with preventing people from violating the law and more to do with securing the social order. Moreover, it is argued that security politics relates to a broader urban politics aimed at nurturing prosperous diversity considered to benefit the city as a whole, at the cost of problematic difference. In conclusion the article argues that urban security politics lends itself to old welfare state structures, even as responsibility for social crime prevention is devolved ‘downwards’ and distributed across and array of agencies. The social democratic legacy – the revised welfare state – seems to offer favorable conditions for plural policing of minority groups in the city.

 

RandiGressgaard2Randi Gressgård is professor at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), and affiliated with the research unit International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER), University of Bergen. Her research interests include migration & minority studies, gender & sexuality studies and urban studies. Among her recent publications are Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010/2012) and ‘The power of (re)attachment in urban strategy: Interrogating the framing of social sustainability in Malmö’ (Environment and Planning A 2014, vol. 46).

Apr
28
Tue
IMER Lunch: Lisa Kings and Vanja Lozic @ UNI Rokkan centre (6 etg)
Apr 28 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Lisa Kings: Contesting urban management regimes: The rise of urban justice movements in Sweden

Addressing segregation, racism and welfare transformation, a new form of grassroots mobilization among young adults is emerging in the peripheries of Swedish cities. The common denominator is that they define themselves as urban justice movements– with place as the social ground for mobilization. Witha Gramscian perspective, the article analysis the rise of urban justice movements in relation to contemporary urban policies in Sweden. We argue that Swedish urban policies during the last 20 years have created a hegemonic urban management regime underpinned by area based programs with a focus on network steering and new forms of partnership between civil society and public institutions. The emergence of urban justice movements is here understood in relation to firsthand negative experience of– and later active revulsion from– having participated in activities and issues related to the urban management regime. These experiences and the later proclaimed autonomy of the movements have been a key condition for the beginning of a broader struggle that merges local rootedness with wider structural-institutional conditionality. (co-authored by Aleksandra Ålund (Linköping University) and Nazem Tahvilzadeh (KTH Royal Institute of Technology).

Skjermbilde 2015-02-17 kl. 13.51.26LISA KINGS holds a PhD in Sociology at Søderthorn University College. Her researh interests are urban theory, social movements, inequality and everyday life.  (lisa.kings@sh.se)

Vanja Lozic: Problematizing parents, governing troubled youth

The paperfocuses on current debate on troubled youth, living in socio-economically deprived suburbs in Sweden, and particularly discourses on problems of alienation, crime, arson and anti-social behaviour among youth. In the paper, interviews with the representatives of different organisations involved in managing the youth problem are analysed. One recurring theme in the interviews is problem discourses representing the parent as a problem. Departing from Foucault´s understanding of governmentality and the formation of subjectivity, we analyse the construction of problems, problematization, and conceivable solutions, as depicted by the interviewees. The problematizations recurring in the interviews are the deficiency of urban space, dysfunctional family relations and parents as being passive and culturally different. On the basis of such problematizations the interviewees propose solutions in various ways fostering the parents to become responsible and active subjects, who have internalised current norms and values. Other central solutions emerging in the interviews are the development of various forms of communicative skills as well as a range of pre-emptive measures targeting the parents. An important conclusion in the paper is that this way of developing possible solutions to the problems of suburban youth tends to focus on the transformation of individual parents, while structural dimensions get out of focus. What appears is a desire to foster parents and thus to produce a certain kind of subject, namely an active, responsible and cooperative individual, involved in the local community. (The paper is co-authored with Magnus Dahlstedt.)

Skjermbilde 2015-02-17 kl. 13.53.40Vanja Lozic holds a PhD in history and issenior lecturer in Science of Education at Kristianstad University, Sweden. His research deals with issues in education from the perspectives of ethnicity, multiculturalism, gender, disability, youth cultures and work integrated learning. At present, he is participating in a research project “Cooperation, education and inclusion in multi-ethnic urban settings”, which concerns the connections between institutional restructuring, youth resistance and strategies for social inclusion. The aim is to investigate the measures for social inclusion within schools, local institutions and civil society actors in socioeconomically deprived areas of large cities in Sweden

May
12
Tue
IMER Lunch: Sara Kohne – The experience of change in culturally diverse urban areas. Examples from two districts in Berlin and Oslo. @ UNI Rokkan centre (6 etg)
May 12 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Sara Kohne: The experience of change in culturally diverse urban areas. Examples from two districts in Berlin and Oslo.

During the last two decades, central inner city areas have constantly become more attractive to the middle class as places for living and leisure. It is especially because of their history and cultural diversity that these urban districts gain ”new” popularity. This development is, among other things, connected to larger processes of economic and societal change, such as globalisation and de-industrialisation, and it is often called gentrification – a process of urban transformation that results in the physical, sociocultural and economic upgrading of city districts.

In taking a qualitative oriented approach on two culturally diverse urban areas that are partly experiencing the process which has just been described, Kohne´s aim is to identify challenges and assets that are experienced by the residents living and working in such districts.

In her presentation, Kohne will present selected findings from her work with the areas Kreuzberg SO36 in Berlin and Grønland-Tøyen in Oslo. She will discuss them in a comparative context.

Skjermbilde 2015-02-17 kl. 14.22.03Sara Kohne is a PhD candidate in the discipline of Cultural Studies at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen. Her research interests lie within the areas of cultural understandings of place, processes of change, and inequality in urban contexts.

 

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).