Migration > Aktiviteter > Migrationsinitiativets seminarer > Conceptualizing 'Mobil...
29. april 2008
Conceptualizing 'Mobility' in Contemporary Migration Research
Research Seminar. 29 April 2008, 13.15-16.00
Presentations from the seminar
Ada Engebrigtsen: Grammers of Mobility and Sedentism
Gunnar Malmberg: Immobility - Rule or Exception?
Background:
Migration has typically been seen as a temporary interruption in a naturally stable, settled life that is then followed by a process of integration as migrants resettle and establish a new life in a migration destination. This approach to migration has been challenged in recent scholarship where ‘mobility' and ‘traveling' have developed as root metaphors for contemporary understandings of social and cultural transformation in an era of globalization. The mobility paradigm challenges researchers in general and migration researchers in particular since most research presupposes particular places as the natural context for studying social and cultural processes - in the case of migration research either the place of origin or the place of destination. It is the purpose of this seminar to investigate the nexus between sedentism and mobility and how a twinned conceptualization might inform and further develop theoretical and methodological approaches to migration and integration.
Program:
13:15-13:25 Welcome
Karen Fog Olwig, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (UC) and head of the Migration Initiative at the University
13.25-13:55 ‘Immobiliy: Rule or Exception?'
Gunnar Malmberg, Professor, Department of Geography, University of Umeå
14:00-14:30 ‘Grammars of mobility and sedentism - Somalis, Roma and the Welfare State'
Ada Engebrigtsen, Senior Researcher, Norwegian Social Research (NOVA)
14:30-15:00 Coffee Break
15:00-16:00 Discussants' Comments
Jytte Agergaard, Department of Geography and Geology, UC
Karsten Pærregaard, Department of Anthropology, UC
Open debate
Keynotes:
Ada Engebrigtsen is a Senior Researcher at Norwegian Social Research, Oslo. Her main areas of research are international migration, transnationality and nomadism/mobility. Her PhD research focused on the Romas in Rumania. She is part of the thematic network: Welfare and Inclusion, at NOVA and the last 4 years she has been working on a comparative project about the adaptation processes of Tamil and Somali migrants in Norway, investigating the networks and local belonging of these young people and their self-understanding as youth in Norway.
Major publications include Exploring Gypsiness. Power, Exchange and Interdependence in a Transylvanian Village, Oxford: Berghahn, 2007, and (with Øivind Fuglerud) Youth in Refugee Families. Family and friendship, safety and freedom? Oslo: Nova Report 3/07.
Gunnar Malmberg is Professor in Human Geography at Department of Geography, University of Umeå. The focus of Malmberg's research is how population movements, being internal and/or international, impacts local, regional and national development. Malmberg has in particular been concerned with migration dynamics and the mobility-immobility nexus as a means to qualify e.g. interregional migration patterns and his research experience cover both the Global North and the Global South.
Gunnar Malmberg has published widely in international academic journals such as Population, Space and Place, Environment and Planning A and Geografiske Annaler.