Progressive Geographies

An excellent discussion of the work of Herbert Marcuse at the Society and Space open site.

Mobility Makes States: Migration and Power in Africa, edited by Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk – now published by University of Pennsylvania Press.

Human mobility has long played a foundational role in producing state territories, resources, and hierarchies. When people move within and across national boundaries, they create both challenges and opportunities. In Mobility Makes States, chapters written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists explore different patterns of mobility in sub-Saharan Africa and how African states have sought to harness these movements toward their own ends.

While border control and intercontinental migration policies remain important topics of study, Mobility Makes States demonstrates that immigration control is best understood alongside parallel efforts by states in Africa to promote both long-distance and everyday movements. The contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and show that the politics of mobility takes place across a wide range of locations, including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets. They examine short-term and circular migrations, everyday commuting and urban expansion, forced migrations, emigrations, diasporic communities, and the mobility of gatekeepers and officers of the state who push and pull migrant populations in different directions. Through the experiences and trajectories of migration in sub-Saharan Africa, this empirically rich volume sheds new light on larger global patterns and state making processes.

Warwick Borders, Race, Ethnicity and Migration Network Public Lecture 2015

Brick Walls: On Racism and Other Hard Histories

Professor Sara Ahmed, Goldsmiths, University of London

Wednesday 20th May 5pm-6.30pm
Room S0.11, Social Sciences Building, University of Warwick

In her book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed considered how diversity work is often described as “a banging your head against a brick wall job.” In this lecture, she reflects further on brick walls as the hardening of histories, or as how histories becomes concrete. But walls that are hard for some (because of who they are, or what they do) do not appear for others. This lecture will invite reflection on how some borders that are tangible and material (that can stop or block bodies from entering) can be understood and lived by others as immaterial (as phantom walls). Thinking through and with walls, the material stuff of power, allows us to explore how diversity work (both the work we do when we try to transform an institution and the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution) can be an experience of shattering and of assembling worlds from being shattered.

The event will be followed by a drinks reception

This is a public lecture and all are welcome.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/bremnetwork/events/#Sara-Ahmed

If you have any queries about this event please contact Dr Hannah Jones, Sociology h.jones.1@warwick.ac.uk

A commentary on critical data studies at the Society and Space open site.