Guest lectures on nationalism and citizenship 13.12.2012
Time: Thursday 13.12.2012 at 12-14
Place: PUB 2, University of Turku, Assistentinkatu 7 (Publicum)
Irene Molina: Violent Nationalism and Its Topographies
Umut Erel: Migrant Mothers Making Citizenship
How do gender, ‘race’, ethnicity and class shape notions of national belonging and citizenship? What meanings are attached to the Swedish flag hanging from the balcony in urban neighbourhoods with a majority of migrant residents? Is the hanging of the flag only an expression of banal nationalism and racism or can it be adopted to promote anti-racist campaigns? How do Turkish migrant women in Western European countries negotiate social citizenship and translocal belonging in their everyday lives? How do they produce new kinds of intimate citizenship through their border-crossing mothering practices and political activities?
Welcome to listen to the lectures!
The lectures are offered by the interdisciplinary PhD course Multicultural and Postcolonial Intersections, organized by the Departments of Sociology and General History. The co-organisers are the Network for Research on Multiculturalism and Societal Interaction (MCnet) and the FiDiPro-programme “Multiculturalism as a New Pathway to Incorporation”. For more information please contact Suvi Keskinen (suvkes@utu.fi), tel. 02-333 6322.
Irene Molina is professor of Cultural Geography at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on urban segregation, postcolonial feminism and racism. Her lecture discusses the results of the recent research project, “Att utforska urbant våld – en studie om rum, makt och social hållbarhet”. Currently Irene Molina leads two research projects. The study “En planering för segregation? Social och etnisk separatism i den svenska staden” (2011-2013) focuses on the growing ethnic and class-related segregation of urban space in Sweden and its causes, with an emphasis on the choices of economicly resourceful groups and their wishes to isolate themselves into wealthy neighbourhoods. The research project “Those left behind – Female migration and the transnational family in Latin America” (2011-2013) studies domestic workers who move between different countries in Latin America, and analyses their living conditions, the situations of their families and the production of gendered and racialised inequalities.
PhD Umut Erel is a RCUK research fellow and lecturer in Sociology at Open University, London, UK. Her research interests include migration, ethnicity, gender and class, culture and representation both empirically and theoretically. She has explored issues of intersectionality, the social construction of skill, notions of belonging and practices of citizenship. Erel’s monograph on “Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship” (Ashgate 2009) addresses these themes through the lens of the life-stories of migrant women from Turkey in Britain and Germany. She is currently exploring migrant women’s mothering practices as citizenship practices in their own right and with respect to shaping their children’s ethnic, cultural, political identities and modes of citizenship, based on empirical research on Polish, Turkish and Kurdish mothers and children in London.