The seminar series for the upcoming year of 2022-2023 aims to question the concept of borders from a multidisciplinary approach and through various methodologies. This includes artificial, physical or sociological border forms and fieldwork on where the borders and boundaries evolve and live (Meier, 2020).
2022-2023 Current Issues on Migration Seminar Series
Borders and Beyond
Organized by: aMiMo IFEA (French Institute of Anatolian Studies) & GAR (Göç Araştırmaları Derneği)
Organizers
aMiMo
The “Migrations & Mobilities axis” (aMiMo), as part of IFEA’s contemporary studies department, brings together social scientists who study migration and mobility phenomenons related to Turkey. Research carried out within aMiMo, through simultaneous and/or comparative analysis of human mobilities at different geographical and institutional scales, aims to reassess academical boundaries (articulating internal and international migrations, emigration and immigration) and nuance theoretical oppositions within the field of Migration Studies (transit/installation, skilled/unskilled, voluntary/forced).
GAR
The Migration Research Association (GAR or Göç Araştırmalar Derneği) is a non-governmental organization founded in Istanbul in 2017. Members of GAR consist of scholars from different disciplines specialized in the field of migration and asylum. GAR aims to encourage and initiate interdisciplinary research on migration and borders, as well as to disseminate the knowledge produced in various research-based studies, and raise awareness on the situation and vulnerabilities of migrants and refugees at the national and international level. One of the most important goals of GAR is to create collective platforms to facilitate dialogue and cooperation between academic knowledge and practical applications in solving the problems faced by migrants, refugees and host communities.
Call for Papers – Seminar Series 2022-2023
The seminar series for the upcoming year of 2022-2023 aims to question the concept of borders from a multidisciplinary approach and through various methodologies. This includes artificial, physical or sociological border forms and fieldwork on where the borders and boundaries evolve and live (Meier, 2020).
Whether in Turkey or elsewhere, borders are used as a tool for ultranationalist and xenophobic speech. In the artificially and more recently delimited Middle-East region, this kind of speech thrives even more. Wars are launched to protect borders, but are also seen as a necessity for peace and security. As a consequence, public debate seems to concentrate around the safety of these borders, wherever they are, leading to the phenomenon of “securitization” (Balzacq, 2018).
Dealing with borders also means dealing with the humans crossing them, when possible, or living around and constituting them. As a result, populist discourses adopting securitization perspective stigmatize and criminalize migrants/exiles , associating them with smugglers or terrorists. These images end up embodying the border itself and reveal the significance of the political work which puts borders and border-crossers on the global political agenda.
In response, this seminar series aims to reflect about the concept of homo itinerans (Monsutti, 2018) which displays the complexity of the contemporary transnational mobilities and shows the limits of the international juridical infrastructure that rely mainly on immobility. In contrast, voices from the field underline the fact that nowadays, for them, immobility is equivalent to death. Taking Afghanistan’s case, Monsutti draws our attention to the several biases of the humanitarian and orientalist imaginaries when tackling the issue of the borders. Imaginaries that we, as researchers, have to question and take into account at every step of the research process.
Applicants (PhD students, Post-doctoral and other researchers) are invited to submit an abstract of max. 250 words and a short bio of max. 150 words (in English). Abstracts should be sent to: amimo.ifea@gmail.com
Applicants should indicate a preferred month during the upcoming academic year (from October 2022 to June 2023, the seminar talks generally take place in the last week of the month) and the preferred language for the seminar (English or Turkish).
Thematic Suggestions (include but are not limited to):
- Artificial borders (history, maps, international agreements, wars, etc)
- Physical borders (construction of walls)
- Invisible borders (gender, segregation)
- Borders in the political speech
- Epistemological or disciplinary borders in migration studies
- Border management
- Borders, boundaries, citizenship and identity.
