Online migration seminar with Professor Janine Dahinden

Migration scholar Professor Janine Dahinden is a visiting Professor at The Open University. The online seminar is organised by OU Migration, Centre for Global Challenges and Social Justice (GCSJ) and Open Psychology Research Centre. The seminar will be chaired by Professor Umut Erel, Director of the Centre for Global Challenges and Social Justice.

The seminar will be presented on Microsoft Teams. If you would like to find out more about the event please contact Dr Nelli Stavropoulou.

Title:

What is migration really about? Technologies of (de)migranticization

Abstract:

‘What is a migrant’? And ‘whom’ is migration policy about? It is obvious that people are not ‘(im)migrants’ by nature. Migrants are not born migrants. They become migrants when they cross a national border, for example. But sometimes people are called migrants even though they have not ever crossed a border but have been citizens of the state they live in for generation, they might have a skin colour or a name that is discursively and politically constructed as not ‘from here’. Drawing on my earlier work on ‘de-migranticization’, I will elaborate in this talk on my ongoing work – which is inspired by and rooted in thoughts of many scholars also working on these issues - on what I call ‘migranticization’: By this I mean the ways in which certain people, but not all, are ascribed migrancy through various social, economic and political processes and how these are linked to power. I will suggest to use ‘migranticization’ as an analytical lens to investigate the uses of migration-related categories and their consequences in terms of power and exclusion from a global system of inequalities and nation-states. I consider migranticization as a performative technology of power and governmentality which is closely related to nation-state logic and coloniality. As such it has to be distinguished from (while overlapping with) racialization, while working intersectionally with gender and class.

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