240095 SE Migrating People, Migrating Culture: Optics, Methods, and Impacts (P4) (2014S)

Seminar Plan June 3-6th 4 Sessions of 3 hours each

We live in a world on the move. There are an estimated 214 million international migrants worldwide, up from 150 million in 2000. In 2010, one in nine people lived in a country where migrants made up 10 or more percent of the population. One out of every 33 persons in the world today is a migrant.

Much migration scholarship has focused on immigrant incorporationon how migrants become part of the countries where they settle. Recent work, on both sides of the Atlantic, reveals how migrants continue to invest, vote, and pray in the countries they come from at the same time that they remain active in the economic and political life of the countries where they move. Both sending and receiving states are waking up to these dynamics and creating new ways to encourage long-term membership without residence and forms of participation and representation without full citizenship. In general, though, while more migrants live some aspects of their lives across borders, they continue to be served by legal, educational, and health care systems that remain stubbornly within the boundaries of the nation-state.

At the same time, and as a result, we are witnessing the rise of what Steve Vertovec calls 'superdiverse' urban spaces. Because migrants from a wider range of countries are settling in more places, with very different legal statuses and access to rights and services, new patterns of inequality and discrimination are emerging. This new complexity is layered onto existing patterns of socioeconomic diversity, residential segregation and social exclusion. What would enable these migrants and the native-born to embrace what Glick Schiller and her colleagues call cosmopolitan sociabilities or the competencies and communication skills that allow people to create social relations of openness and inclusiveness in the world? What conditions create what Gilroy calls 'multicultural conviviality,' that arises when cultures, histories, and structures of meaning that had been kept apart by large distances now come together in the school, bus, café, cell, waiting room, or traffic jam? Achieving conviviality does not negate difference or deny that power inequalities persist. The end goal is not a universalistic self-definition or a single global political project. But if, as Ulrich Beck argues, cosmopolitanism is a necessity rather than a luxury, how do we move beyond it just as an attitude or an ethos to create participatory institutions that reflect and respond to contemporary global integration? Where might the cultural elements come from with which to reimagine, let alone put into place, a social contract not fulfilled solely inside the nation-state?

At least part of the answer lies at the intersection of migration and cultural studies. Migrating people and the values, discourses, and practices that move with them need to be seen as parts of the same whole because culture constitutes the discursive background and institutional arrangements against which successful diverse societies take shape. Yet, until recently, migration scholarship has been curiously silent about culture. Bringing culture back means not only looking at how ideas, people, and objects circulate but also seeing migration as an inherently cultural act. Work in cultural sociology that treats culture as context, as discourses and assumptions embedded in institutions, or as repertoires of meanings that are marshaled in response to specific dilemmas and purposes can help us move closer to getting our categories right.