«Mobilitet, moral og migrasjon:  familisme – begrepet i norske og italienske kontekster.»

Seminaret tar for seg hvordan middelhavslandenes familisme – begrep konstrueres og erfares i migrasjons-kontekster blant nordmenn i Italia og italienere i Norge. Dagens familisme utfordres både av «post-moderne” endringer i familie-strukturen, slik som lav fertilitet og stigende skilsmisse-rater, og av finanskrise og migrasjon.I Sør-Europa eksisterer lav fertilitet side om side med tradisjonelle omsorgs-organiseringer og parallelt med kontant-tunge velferdsprogrammer og begrenset produksjon av tjenester for de unge og de eldre. Den sentrale oppfatningen i komparative studier av relasjonen mellom familie og velferd er at velferdsstatene baserer politikken på en «tatt-for-gitt» holdning til en kjønnstradisjonell familie-institusjon, og denne kulturelle forutsetningen sementerer de tradisjonelle familie-strukturene. Men i hvilken grad er familiestrukturer og kulturelle og sosiale normer og verdier bundet sammen med idealtypiske regimer og nye migrasjonsmønstre?Nyere forskning viser til at sør-europeiske kvinner drømmer om den nordiske velferdsstaten eller en stat som organiserer familie -og arbeidsbalansen bedre. De vil ha tilgang på flere og bedre offentlige omsorgstjenester. Nordiske velferdsstater framstår som reneste paradiser for kvinner i Italia, og definitivt som et ideal, hevder samfunnsforskere. På den andre siden ser vi at mens italienere drømmer om velferd og arbeid, drømmer nordmenn om mer familieliv. En av de norske informantene i mitt prosjekt sier at hennes drøm er «å få til et italiensk familieliv kombinert med et norsk arbeidsliv». Hvordan er forbindelsen mellom familie-strukturer og familie-verdier? Hvordan er de relatert til mobilitet, moral og migrasjon?

Lise Widding Isaksen er professor i sosiologi på Universitetet i Bergen. Hun jobber for tiden med prosjektene 1) «Mobilitet, moral og migrasjon: en studie av familiekulturer i Norge og Italia» , 2) «Polish Female Migrants and Their Families: A Study of Care Deficits» og 3) «Welfare Models, Demographic Patterns and Family Strategies in the Context of the Financial Crisis in Spain»

Siste publikasjoner:

Lise Widding Isaksen, 2010 (ed): Global Care Work. Gender and Migration in Nordic Societies. Nordic Academic Press, Lund, Sverige

Lise Widding Isaksen (2012) “Transnational Spaces of Care: Migrant Nurses in Norway.” In Social Politics, International Studies in Gender, State and Society, vol. 19, number 1, spring 2012, p.58-78, Oxford University Press, Oxford

“Children Left Behind” i samarbeid med Uma Devi og Arlie R. Hochschild i  Hochschild, Arlie R., 2013: «So How’s the Family» and other essays», University of California Press, Berkeley

Communicating Migration Seminar Series IMER Bergen spring and autumn 2014

The IMER seminar series for 2014 will cover how migration and ethnic relations are communicated in every-day encounters, in mass and social media, in politics and in teaching at the universities.  Has the way people talk about migration and migrants in different social contexts changed over time, and in which ways has it changed? How does migration theory and research fit in with other topics and theories in the social sciences, and how do results from migration research inform public debate and policy development? Communicating migration will be discussed from various angles in our seminar series on international migration and ethnic relations during spring and autumn 2014. We welcome papers that touch upon this broad theme from different angles.  Historical analyses of change over time in regard to politics and public debate, research foci and disciplinary concerns are specifically welcomed.  The seminar series will end with a two-day conference in October/November 2014.

The Children of the Revolution: Reflections on Chinese London and how to Theorise these New Forms of Migration

This paper explores some of the London data from a three-city investigation of migration. The other two cities are Beijing and Hong Kong, and in each city we are exploring young (23-39) graduate migrants from the other two cities in order to understand how global mobility features in young professionals’ life and career planning. Little has been written about UK migrants in Hong Kong and Beijing, and the existing literature on Chinese migrants in London is centred on long-term (often depicted as poor and illegal) migrants from Hong Kong. Such studies do not begin to capture the lives of the new young migrants, many of whom are from Mainland Chinese cities, who must navigate new border restrictions favouring the wealthy and the highly talented. The paper will explore some of the challenges to existing migration theory these young urban migrants pose.

Caroline Knowles

Caroline Knowles is Professor of Sociology and former director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths, University of London.  She is known for her work with artists and photographers exploring the intersections between art and sociology in urban social research. Following her interest in materials and translocality she has just completed the biography of a pair of flip-flop sandals funded by the Leverhulme Trust with Singapore artist Michael Tan. Flip-Flop: A Journey Through Globalisation’s Backroads will be published in May by Pluto Press. Following her interests in migration she is also currently researching the Beijing, London, Hong Kong circuit travelled by young migrants in these three cities in collaboration with Ho Wing Chung at the City University of Hong Kong. She is the author of many books and papers on cities, ethnicity, migration and mobilities including Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys (2009) University of Chicago Press with US photographer and Sociologist Douglas Harper.

Communicating Migration Seminar Series IMER Bergen spring and autumn 2014

The IMER seminar series for 2014 will cover how migration and ethnic relations are communicated in every-day encounters, in mass and social media, in politics and in teaching at the universities.  Has the way people talk about migration and migrants in different social contexts changed over time, and in which ways has it changed? How does migration theory and research fit in with other topics and theories in the social sciences, and how do results from migration research inform public debate and policy development? Communicating migration will be discussed from various angles in our seminar series on international migration and ethnic relations during spring and autumn 2014. We welcome papers that touch upon this broad theme from different angles.  Historical analyses of change over time in regard to politics and public debate, research foci and disciplinary concerns are specifically welcomed.  The seminar series will end with a two-day conference in October/November 2014.

Ida Tolgensbakk – Swedish migrants in Norwegian media and popular culture

In this seminar Ida Tolgensbakk will present some findings from her PhD research on young, Swedish labor migrants in Oslo. In everyday encounters in Norway, the young Swedes are identified as such primarily through linguistic characteristics, and not for instance skin color, phenotype, or dress. That is, they are audible rather than visible migrants. Tolgensbakk will discuss what kind of consequences this has on the lives of the young Swedes, as well as look into the related questions of how the young Swedes are presented in Norwegian media and popular culture.

Ida Tolgensbakk

Department of cultural studies and oriental languages, UiO. Ida Tolgensbakk has a master in folklore studies from 2005 (on national identity in the Faroe Islands). She worked three years at the Norwegian Institute of Local history, mainly focusing on migrant’s life stories. She is now studying young, Swedish labor migrants moving to Oslo. Her research is based on life story interviews, fieldwork on a Facebook group, and texts from popular culture and the media.

Read more here: http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/people/aca/idatol/

Communicating Migration Seminar Series IMER Bergen spring and autumn 2014

The IMER seminar series for 2014 will cover how migration and ethnic relations are communicated in every-day encounters, in mass and social media, in politics and in teaching at the universities.  Has the way people talk about migration and migrants in different social contexts changed over time, and in which ways has it changed? How does migration theory and research fit in with other topics and theories in the social sciences, and how do results from migration research inform public debate and policy development? Communicating migration will be discussed from various angles in our seminar series on international migration and ethnic relations during spring and autumn 2014. We welcome papers that touch upon this broad theme from different angles.  Historical analyses of change over time in regard to politics and public debate, research foci and disciplinary concerns are specifically welcomed.  The seminar series will end with a two-day conference in October/November 2014.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Niger, Hans Lucht discusses how stranded migrants have become facilitators of the very journey they have failed to make themselves. These connection men, or ‘pushers’ as they say themselves, are now key actors in high-risk migration across the Sahara Desert via Libya to Europe. They have somehow turned all their misfortunes into a form of capital, while awaiting a new chance to go to Europe.

Hans Lucht is a senior researcher and journalist at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. His book on undocumented migration from West Africa to Europe (“Darkness before Daybreak – African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today”) won the 2012 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award from the Association for Africanist Anthropology.

Seminar is held in cooperation between the Institute of Social anthropology and IMER BErgen.

Sans-papiers into workers: how historic strikes changed the public face of undocuemented migrants in France

From 2008 to 2010, with the support of a coalition of trade unions and immigrant rights groups under the leadership of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), thousands of France’s undocumented migrant workers conducted strikes and occupied their workplaces, demanding that their employers sponsor their regulatisation applications. Unheard of in French migration and labour history, the mobilization was based on a recent change in legislation allowing employers to solicit the regularisation of a migrant by providing a formal job offer. While the French government’s original intent was to make access to legal status contingent on employer decision alone, union action broadened its scope by bringing the whole employment relationship into the process, including the stakeholders and labour rights built into it by decades of social struggles, such as the right to strike and the right for striking workers to occupy their company without police intrusion. Based on three years of extensive participant observation and more than a hundred in-depth interviews with migrant workers, union and civil rights organization staff and activists, employers in the restaurant, cleaning, temporary staffing and construction industries, and French national and local government officials, our paper considers the strategic challenges encountered by this innovative movement which broke simultaneously with the more traditional repertoires of both French trade unions and the ‘sans-papiers’ movements of the preceding decade.

Related to the topic Chavin has also worked on a documentary film that he will bring with him:
http://www.vezfilm.org/comingforavisit/
http://vimeo.com/53048336

Sébastien Chauvin is assistant professor of Sociology at the the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science
Research. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2006 and a
lecturer in sociology at the Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne from 2006 to 2008. He
conducted in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with mostly undocumented Hispanic immigrant
day laborers in the Chicago region, including the staffing industry that employed them, and
the social movements in which they mobilized, as part of his PhD dissertation (EHESS Paris,
2007). Since late 2007, he has been working on a collective study exploring the labor market
experience and following the union-supported mobilization of undocumented immigrant
workers in France. His main research deals with the relationship between civic inequality and
precarious work. He also keeps an active interest in gender and sexuality studies, social capital
and the sociology of elites, social theory, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author
of a number of articles and book chapters, as well as Les agences de la précarité. Journaliers à Chicago (Paris: Le Seuil, 2010), Introduction aux études sur le genre (with L. Bereni, A. Jaunait, and A.Revillard ; Brussels : De Boeck, 2012, 2nd edition), and On bosse ici, on reste ici: La grève des sans-papiers: une aventure inédite (with P. Barron, A. Bory, N. Jounin, and L. Tourette ; Paris : La découverte, 2011).

Communicating Migration Seminar Series IMER Bergen spring and autumn 2014

The IMER seminar series for 2014 will cover how migration and ethnic relations are communicated in every-day encounters, in mass and social media, in politics and in teaching at the universities.  Has the way people talk about migration and migrants in different social contexts changed over time, and in which ways has it changed? How does migration theory and research fit in with other topics and theories in the social sciences, and how do results from migration research inform public debate and policy development? Communicating migration will be discussed from various angles in our seminar series on international migration and ethnic relations during spring and autumn 2014. We welcome papers that touch upon this broad theme from different angles.  Historical analyses of change over time in regard to politics and public debate, research foci and disciplinary concerns are specifically welcomed.  The seminar series will end with a two-day conference in October/November 2014.

Note: Venue has changed: Anthropology, not Rokkansenteret.

OUT-reach! – Kommunikasjon av «frivillig retur» til irregulære migranter i Norge.

Hvordan kan en stat på best mulig måte gi informasjon om ”frivillig retur” til irregulære migranter? Bør ikke-statlige organisasjoner delta i denne oppgaven, eller vil det å påta seg slike oppgaver undergrave andre funksjoner disse organisasjonene har? Hvordan kommuniseres frivillig retur i dag, og finnes det alternative bedre måter å gjøre dette på?

”Frivillig retur” har fått sterk kritikk av forskere, migranter og organisasjoner for at deltagelse i slike program ofte mangler nettopp det frivillige elementet. Innen forskningen har ‘frivillig retur’ blitt sett som tett knyttet opp til tvangsretur, deportasjon og institusjoner som opprettholder statens grenser. I et slikt perspektiv blir tilbud om «frivillig retur” gjerne sett på som ikke mer enn en mildere variant av tvangsretur og i beste fall en form for obligatorisk retur. «Frivillig retur» er altså tett knyttet opp mot mye av elementer som ikke-statlige organisasjoner ofte har stilt seg kritiske til. Hva er da rasjonale som ligger bak at ulike ikke-statlige hjelpe- og advocacyorganisasjoner eller ulike diaspora- og migrantorganisasjoner tar på seg ansvaret for å formidle ”frivillig retur”? Og på den annen side, er overnevnte årsaker den eneste grunnen til at enkelte organisasjoner ikke velger å gi slik informasjon?

Basert på forskning tilknyttet en kommende UDI rapport i regi av Uni Rokkansenteret vedrørende informasjon om ”frivillig retur” til irregulære migranter utenfor mottak i Norge utforsker Bendixen og Kjærre det etiske og moralske grenselandet som er konteksten for informasjon om frivillig retur, hvordan ulike aktører stiller seg til slikt informasjonsarbeid, og til slutt hvordan de irregulære migrantene selv ser på denne informasjonen i lys av deres livssituasjon i Norge.

Synnøve Kristine Nepstad Bendixsen er postdoktor ved sosial antropologisk institutt i Bergen, og forsker på Uni Rokkansenteret hvor hun er tilknyttet prosjektet Provision of Welfare to Irregular Migrants (PROVIR). Hun har tidligere studert på London Scool of Economics og har en PhD fra Humboldt universitetet (Berlin) og Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Hennes forskningsfelt er religiøsitetsutforming blant unge Muslimer i Berlin, samt flere forskningsprosjekter innen tema returmigrasjon og irregulær migrasjon, og hun har flere publikasjoner innen disse feltene.

Halvar Andreassen Kjærre er PhD stipendiat ved IMER/Sosialantropologisk institutt i Bergen og har publisert artikler og deltatt på flere forskningsprosjekter innen temaet irregulær/illegalisert migrasjon. Han er også tilknyttet prosjektet PROVIR og jobber for tiden med sin PhD om mobilitet blant irregulære migranter i Schengen/Europa. Tidligere prosjekter har vært ved NTNU samfunnsforskning i Trondheim, Sosiologisk institutt i Oslo, og han jobber nå sammen med Synnøve på overnevnt prosjekt ved Uni Rokkansenteret.

Lessons from the past: framing post-war immigration in Germany by historical analogies

In many West European countries, the experience of mass immigration after 1945 was perceived as something basically new and unprecedented. In the lengthy process of coming to terms with the new situation and of developing a self-understanding as countries of immigration and of ethnic pluralism, historical arguments often played an important role. By placing present-day immigration into a historical perspective, by constructing narratives of continuity (and discontinuity) and not least by presenting persuasive historical analogies, historians (and others) introduced arguments that informed the debates of the day and allowed the experiences of immigration and multi-ethnicity to be integrated into (national) narratives of identity. The German case is particularly interesting in this respect, since a tradition of tolerance and successful integration had to be invented in spite of the fresh memories of the Nazi-past that were witness to the contrary.

Christhard Hoffmann (born 1952 in Luneburg, Germany) is a German historian and professor of modern European history at the University of Bergen. In the period 2007-2013 he was Head of the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion.

Hoffmann defended in 1986 his doctoral dissertation on German Antiquity historians’ representation of Jews and Judaism in the 19th and 20th centuries [1] at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he also worked as a researcher for many years. From 1994 to 1998 he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and since 1998 he has worked at the University of Bergen.

Hoffmann has an extensive list of publications in the fields of German-Jewish history and cultural history, history of anti-Semitism and migration history.

Communicating Migration Seminar series

The IMER seminar series for 2014 will cover how migration and ethnic relations are communicated in every-day encounters, in mass and social media, in politics and in teaching at the universities.  Has the way people talk about migration and migrants in different social contexts changed over time, and in which ways has it changed? How does migration theory and research fit in with other topics and theories in the social sciences, and how do results from migration research inform public debate and policy development?

Communicating migration will be discussed from various angles in our seminar series on international migration and ethnic relations during spring and autumn 2014. We welcome papers that touch upon this broad theme from different angles.  Historical analyses of change over time in regard to politics and public debate, research foci and disciplinary concerns are specifically welcomed.

COMMUNICATING MIGRATION SEMINARS: ESPEN HELGESEN – “Your dad is looking for you” – Children’s perspectives on state intervention in immigrant families in Norway

Several recent international news stories have described state-initiated forced separation of children and parents in Norway, illustrating how local decisions in the Child Welfare Service can have widespread ramifications outside the families involved. In this paper I draw on ethnographic fieldwork among immigrant families in Kristiansand, Norway, to show how a group of children responded when one of their friends suddenly disappeared. The secrecy surrounding the inner workings of the Child Welfare Service led the children to frame the incident as a “kidnapping”, and several children expressed fear that they, too, would be separated from their families. Frustrated with the lack of an explanation of what had happened to their friend, the children turned to online worlds, where they could express their fears and concerns by sharing artwork with friends outside the adult gaze.

Espen Helgesen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, currently finishing his thesis on technology-mediated sociality and self-formation among children of immigrants in Norway.

Communicating Migration Seminar Series IMER Bergen spring and autumn 2014

The IMER seminar series for 2014 will cover how migration and ethnic relations are communicated in every-day encounters, in mass and social media, in politics and in teaching at the universities.  Has the way people talk about migration and migrants in different social contexts changed over time, and in which ways has it changed? How does migration theory and research fit in with other topics and theories in the social sciences, and how do results from migration research inform public debate and policy development? Communicating migration will be discussed from various angles in our seminar series on international migration and ethnic relations during spring and autumn 2014. We welcome papers that touch upon this broad theme from different angles.  Historical analyses of change over time in regard to politics and public debate, research foci and disciplinary concerns are specifically welcomed.  The seminar series will end with a two-day conference in October/November 2014.