Misson

Nowadays in Europe, migration has acquired different meanings and has been reacted to in various ways. Reactions depend on the country of origin (migrants from Germany or the USA are treated differently than migrants from Turkey), and on the symbolic capital (how educated are they? Which professions do they have?); moreover reactions depend on language proficiency (how well do migrants speak the language of the host country?), and lastly, on gender (Turkish women are treated differently than Turkish men; Nigerian women are treated differently than Nigerian men, related to stereotypes and prejudices as well as to values and norms of the respective women and their cultures of origin). Various new laws on citizenship and employment are debated and implemented across Europe, fuelled by a ‘politics of fear’ which is usually propagated by mainstream and populist parties. Few counter-discourses can be observed.

Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Symposium, IDee, 1-3 July 2010, University of Vienna

Organisers: Renée Schroeder and Ruth Wodak

Coordinator and Contact: Michaela Messer, michi.messer@univie.ac.at

This international symposium is dedicated to the discussion of the multiple interdisciplinary dimensions of ‘migrations’, both from the viewpoints of the Social Sciences and Humanities as well as from the manifold perspectives of the Natural Sciences. In this way, salient glocal phenomena will be covered in invited panels on:  

Debating Migration; Education, Language, and Migration; Fundamentals of Diffusion and Spread in the Natural Sciences and beyond;

Media Representations of Migrants and Migration; Migration and the Genes;

Migration, Identity, and Belonging; Migration in/and Autobiographies; Urban Development and Migration.

A number of prominent plenary speakers will frame this event: Rainer Bauböck (EUI, Florence), Anne-Marie Fortier (Lancaster, UK), Hans-Jürgen Krumm (Vienna), Teun van Dijk (Barcelona), Nina Glick-Schiller (Manchester/Halle an der Saale), Karen Fog Olwig (Copenhagen).

In addition, NGOs, journalists, and politicians will be contacted to be able to make practitioners’ opinions and experiences visible.