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Tuesday, 23 July 2019

Professor Bridget Anderson lectures on Μigration

The European Public Law Organization (EPLO) organized a Guest Lecture featuring Professor Bridget Anderson a leading migration scholar on Tuesday July 23, 2019 from 7:00 until 8:30 PM at the EPLO Premises at the Roman Agora (Plaka). The title of her lecture was “Migration Studies – Making a difference”.

Dr. Theodoros Fouskas, Sociologist, lecturer and researcher on migration at the University of West Attica and research associate at the European Public Law Organization (EPLO) provided an overview of Prof. Bridget Anderson’s work and coordinated the discussion and the event.

Migration Studies – Making a difference

Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, University of Bristol, UK mentioned among others:

How can migration studies make a difference, more particularly, how can migration studies make a difference in the current European conjuncture? The field has grown significantly since the 1990s with some outstanding scholars, many of whom, in the tradition of the social scientists who dominate the field, want to impact on the world. Yet it seems we are failing: more people are dying on difficult and dangerous journeys, and in many countries the populist mood is resulting in increasing hostility to migrants and refugees – indeed anyone who looks ‘foreign’. In this presentation I will argue that those of us who want to make a difference must begin by taking a critical look at our field and, appropriately, its borders. I will invite us to think about how our research engages with (or not) race and class, and how that relates to methodological nationalism. I will then suggest that we must move beyond the critical, to uncover connections firstly between ‘migrants’ and ‘citizens’; secondly between human movement and other types of mobility, including the mobility of goods and of capital; and thirdly between contemporary ‘migration’ enforcement and historical efforts to control the mobility of the poor. These kinds of moves have the potential to enable us to use migration and responses to it as a lens through which we can better understand and move beyond current migration politics. However, to do so, we need to build new audiences for our research, and develop new connections between research and practice. All of these suggestions take me out of my comfort zone. But who said making a difference was going to be easy?

Bridget has a DPhil in Sociology and previous training in Philosophy and Modern Languages. She is the author of Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books, 2000). She co-edited Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy with Martin Ruhs (Oxford University Press, 2010 and 2012), The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation with Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti (Springer, 2013), and Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics with Isabel Shutes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

 

 

tags: EPLO, lecture, Bridget Anderson,migration, studies, make, difference

Ms Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, Mr Theodoros Fouskas, Sociologist, Ph.D., Univ.of West Attica (UNIWA), EPLO
Ms Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, Mr Theodoros Fouskas, Sociologist, Ph.D., Univ.of West Attica (UNIWA), EPLO

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