Migrations Virtual Symposium

When: Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: Virtual event, online

The Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary, Cornell’s Migrations initiative and the Queen Mary Global Policy Institute invite Queen Mary and Cornell colleagues to join a discussion on global migrations, featuring postdoctoral fellows and early career scholars from both universities. This virtual symposium will include presentations and faculty-led discussion.

Speakers

• Biometrics, Belonging, and Mobility: Governing the ‘unidentified’ in Kenya
  Keren Weitzberg is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary with 15 years of experience in East Africa conducting fieldwork in cross-cultural, multilingual settings. Her work exists at the intersection of science and technology studies, migration studies, and critical race studies, examining problematics related to mobility, digital identity, biometrics, and fintech.

• From Migrant to Citizen to Refugee: a Global History of the 1972 Ugandan Asian Expulsion
  Dr Ria Kapoor is a Lecturer in History and IHSS Fellow in Queen Mary's School of History. Her work focuses on how worldwide concepts, like that of the refugee, of human rights, and of nationality and statelessness, especially as they are enshrined in UN instruments, are subject to change based on their reception and transmission in sites in the Global South. The aim of her work is to shift focus from thinking of whether the problem is in actors from the so-called ‘Global South’ misapplying ideas of immigration and asylum to asking if the principles underpinning the liberal internationalist order reflect the realities of all peoples in the aftermath of empire.

• Stories without Borders: Filmmaking in contexts of protracted displacement
  Yasmin Fedda is a Lecturer and IHSS Fellow in Queen Mary's School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. Her work focuses on the use of a camera as a form of research, and how it can spark discussions, provoke performances and reveal intangible realities of social and political life, which may be better represented through the medium of sight and sound. This research project provokes our understandings of displacement affected communities by using a whole of society approach - including the ‘host’ population, amongst others, and approaching the ‘economy’ as including both financial and non-financial transactions. 

• Eleanor Paynter is currently an ACLS fellow and Migrations fellow at Cornell. Her work is in the area of critical refugee studies, incorporating approaches from narrative, media, and cultural studies to consider experiences and representations of precarious and undocumented migration, asylum, and human rights. Focused on the Black Mediterranean, her research and public writing respond to anti-immigrant racism and postcolonial border dynamics. 
• Ángel A. Escamilla García is a Migrations postdoctoral fellow at Cornell. His research focuses on how migrant youth negotiate high-risk environments. His current project uses ethnographic methods and interviews to explore the different strategies that Central American youth use to migrate through Mexico on their way to the United States.

Discussants

• Eric Tagliacozzo, co-chair of the Migrations initiative and the John Stambaugh Professor of History. He is also the director of Cornell's Comparative Muslim Societies Program, the director of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and the contributing editor of the journal Indonesia.
• Kavita Datta is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the Study of Migration, Professor of Development Geography and a member of the Queen Mary Global Policy Institute's Advisory Board.