Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives
The Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC (GHI PRO) invites proposals for papers to be presented at the fourth Bucerius Young Scholars Forum, which will be held at UC Berkeley, October 12-14, 2020. We seek proposals from post-doctoral scholars, recent PhDs, as well as those in the final stages of their dissertations with a background in history and/or related fields.
The Bucerius Young Scholars Forum, funded by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, is an annual program designed to bring together a transatlantic group of ten junior scholars based in Germany, Europe, and North America to explore new research in the history of migration with a particular focus on questions arising from interlacing the perspectives of migration and knowledge. The forum is connected to the 2020 Annual Bucerius Lecture on “Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives,” which will be delivered by historian Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester) on October 12, 2020.
We call for empirically rich and theoretically informed contributions that bring migration studies into conversation with the history of knowledge. Scholars of migration continually deal with the production of knowledge, particularly through the ways state officials categorize, racialize, or legalize migrants. Epistemological questions also arise when researchers follow migrants’ trajectories along the geographies and temporalities their very movements help shape and create. Moreover, migrants themselves become experts of migration: They produce, contest, and deploy political, legal, or economic knowledge pertaining to their everyday lives as migrants. They also contribute to the circulation and transfer of all types of knowledge (professional, communal, academic, etc).
From the many and varied intersections of migration and knowledge, contributions could discuss how approaches and assumptions currently used in the history of knowledge or in Science and Technology Studies change our understanding of migration. Alternatively, contributors might test approaches in the history of knowledge from the vantage point of migration studies; may initiate a critical reflection on how spatially mobile groups are represented in migration research; a paper could explore the concepts and narratives, categories and data that shape the perception of migration and diversity in different historical and social contexts; examine the history of the field of migration studies; or approach border and migrations regimes from a history of knowledge perspective.
The Bucerius Young Scholars Forum examines the given theme from a trans-epochal, transregional, or interdisciplinary perspective and seeks to account for categories such as religion, class, race/ethnicity, gender, or age and generation. While the focus of the forum will be on histories of migrant knowledge, we encourage applications from emerging scholars working in the fields of social sciences, political sciences, anthropology, geography, migration or area studies, etc.