Events

This panel discussion is held in conjunction with the workshop on Decolonising Migration Studies?, organized by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS), with funding support from the University of Auckland.

CHAIRPERSONS

Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Prof Francis L. Collins, Waipapa Taumata Rau – University of Auckland

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

Decolonising Migration Studies? explores the relationship between colonialism and migration studies and addresses the future of the field in a time of intellectual decolonization. It responds to growing calls in migration studies to decolonize the intellectual and methodological foundations of this field of research. Echoing interventions in other parts of the social sciences, these calls highlight the colonial foundations of migration knowledge, its indebtedness to disciplines that emerged within European enlightenment traditions and the ongoing dominance of the field by Western scholars, contexts, literature and concepts. Such interventions raise crucial questions about the generation of knowledge about migration in a globalizing world that continues to be shaped by imperial and colonial legacies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Radhika Mongia is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, where she has also served as Director of the Graduate Program in Sociology and as Associate Director of the York Center for Asian Research. Mongia’s research is situated at the intersection of history, law, and political theory and examines issues of migration, citizenship, and state formation. She is the author of Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Duke University Press, 2018 and Permanent Black Press [India], 2019). In addition, her work has appeared in various edited volumes and in journals such as Public Culture, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Gender and History, and Cultural Studies, among others. Her current research, titled “Citizenship Deprivation: Legality, Bureaucracy, and the Everyday”, explores how recent practices of identification and new citizenship legislation in India are related to broader transformations in migration regulation, citizenship regimes, and statelessness.

Lucy Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on asylum, human rights, policy-making, and the legacies of colonialism. She is author of three books: Asylum After Empire (2017), Impoverishment and Asylum (2019), Migration Studies and Colonialism (with Joe Turner, 2021), and co-edited the collection Postcoloniality and Forced Migration (2022). She was awarded the UK Philip Leverhulme Prize 2020 for her research achievements in the area of asylum and migration.

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Born in Romania, she received her undergraduate degree in English and German philology at the University of Bucharest and her PhD in Sociology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt, Germany. She was a research fellow at Boston College in 1999-2000, a visiting professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro (2007-2008), and Professor for the Sociology of global inequalities at Freie Universität Berlin (2012-2015). She works on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Her work has been published in French, English, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, and Swedish. She co-edited (with Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Sérgio Costa) Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches (Routledge 2010) and authored Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism (Routledge, 2016). With Anca Parvulescu, she recently co-authored Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires (Cornell UP 2022), which received the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Barrington Moore Award for best book in comparative and historical sociology from the American Sociological Association in 2023.

Sin Yee Koh is Senior Assistant Professor of Asian Migration, Mobility and Diaspora at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She is also Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. She is a human geographer working at the intersections of migration studies, urban studies and postcolonial geography. Her work uses the lens of migration and mobility to understand the circulations of people, capital, and aspirations in and through cities. She has published on migration and colonial legacies, diaspora strategies, academic and teacher expatriate mobilities, migration and urban intermediaries, lifestyle migration-led urban speculation, cities and the super-rich, and the globalisation of real estate. She is the author of Race, Education and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies, and a Culture of Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.