SEMINAR CANCELLED | Bordering

SEMINAR CANCELLED

Due to planned UCU strike action taking place in February and March, this seminar has been cancelled.

Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2020

Feminism, Categorisation and Forced Migration

This interdisciplinary series will explore a range of topics in refugee law, politics and history with particular attention being paid to feminist and/or gendered approaches to displacement and mobility and the categorisation(s) of people as ‘refugees’, ‘citizens’, ‘settlers’ or ‘migrants’.

Series convener: Catherine Briddick, Martin James Departmental Lecturer in Gender and Forced Migration

about the speakers

Georgie Wemyss is Senior Lecturer, Programme Leader for the Foundation Year in Social Sciences and Co-Director at the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging. From 2013 to 2016 she worked on the EUBorderscapes project, investigating the evolving concepts of state borders in Europe. Her interest in the everyday processes of bordering grew out of her D.Phil ethnographic research about Britishness and belonging together with insights gained from 20 years teaching social anthropology to adults returning to education in East London. Previously she worked as a youth worker in Tower Hamlets and lived in India and Bangladesh where she studied at the Bangla Academy. Her book, The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging explores how differing narratives of Britishness obscure colonial histories in ways that work against the belonging of second and third generation British citizens in the present. She was an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Migration at the University of Surrey from 2005 to 2007 and Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College from 2007 to 2011.

Nira Yuval-Davis is Professor Emeritus, Honorary Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London. She has been the President of the Research Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnic Relations) of the International Sociological Association, founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism and the international research network on Women In Militarized Conflict Zones and has acted as a consultant for various UN and human rights organisations. Nira Yuval-Davis has won the 2018 International Sociological Association Distinguished Award for Excellence in Research and Practice. She has written widely on intersected gendered nationalisms, racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/and everyday bordering as well as on situated intersectionality and dialogical epistemology. Among her books are Woman-Nation-State, 1989, Racialized Boundaries,1992, Unsettling Settler Societies, 1995, Gender and Nation, 1997, The Warning Signs of Fundamentalism, 2004, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, 2011, Women Against Fundamentalism, 2014 and Bordering (forthcoming). Her works have been translated into more than ten languages.