Focus: Migration
Description and Schedule
Description
The migration of peoples is one of the central social, economic, and political processes shaping the contemporary world. Though migration is motivated by a range of causes -- for instance, the need for economic survival and political pressures such as war and persecution -- the regulation, experience, and outcomes of migration are centrally determined by regimes of gender, sexuality, and race. However, even as migrations presuppose and reiterate gendered, racial and sexual formations, they also function to transform them.
This conference seeks to develop our understanding of migration in several ways. First, we will assume that sexuality, gender and race are essential frameworks for making sense of migration (and we note that sexuality in particular has been relatively neglected in contemporary scholarship on migration). Second, we hope through this conference to generate modes of interdisciplinary inquiry that can bridge the divide between macro-level structural processes, most often studied by social scientists, and micro-level cultural processes, most often studied by humanities scholars. And, third, the complexities and variations in the causes and sites of migration demand that we distinguish different forms of movement such as diaspora, refuge, exile, asylum, displacement, seasonal labor, or indeed, tourism. Keeping such distinctions in mind, this conference will seek to move beyond the focus on immigration to first world countries that currently dominates the academic literature, including in our discussions attention to migrations and refugee populations that challenge or do not fit within this paradigm.
With these broad parameters in view, we invite participants to address questions such as the following: How does the regulation of migration managed through the trans- and sub-national juridical apparatuses of states, also regulate, manage, and transform identity formations organized through gender, sexuality and race? What lines of analytic symmetry and divergence can we draw through a comparative view of diverse forms of migration? In what ways do structural transformations in global capitalism harness or challenge normative regimes of desire through the movement of people? How is the relation between desire and need understood within and transformed by practices of migration? How are notions of kinship ruptured, realigned, or retrenched through migration? As people move across geographic spaces, how do varied idioms, practices, and constructions of sexuality circulate within and across economic, political, and cultural domains at a variety of scales? How might we specify the relations between these domains with regard to migration? How can a reassessment of historical patterns of migration inform our analysis today?
This conference is motivated by a commitment to providing ways of thinking about migration that can intervene in processes of domination and exploitation. Since the possibilities for redressing the various forms of injustice that often accompany migration depend significantly on the concepts and paradigms we use to understand the movement of peoples, we seek to bring together scholars (whose work may not be bound by the academy) and those who work in and across diverse institutional/practical domains to generate knowledges that are also practices of social change.
Focus: Migration
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Friday, April 5th
9am Coffee and Pastries
9:30 Welcome
Miranda Joseph, Director, Sex, Race and Globalization Project
10-Noon Panel 1: Human Rights
moderator: Anne Betteridge, University of Arizona
Jennifer Hyndman, Simon
Fraser University
Ordering Disorder: Managing 'the Displaced' as Liminal Subjects
Leslye Obiora, University
of Arizona College of Law
A Refuge from Tradition: Reflections on an Emerging Paradigm
for Asylum Status
Isabel Garcia
Human Rights Implications of US Immigration/Border Policies
Noon-1 Lunch provided
1-3 Panel 2: Representations
moderator: Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona
Jasbir Puar, Rutgers
University
A Crisis of Mobility: Migration and Queer Tourism Post 9-11
Erica Rand, Bates College
Heritage Sex
Radhika Mongia, University
of California, Santa Cruz
Sex, Health and the Migrant Body
3:30-5:30 Panel 3: Labor and Geographies of Migration
moderator: Laura Tabili, University of Arizona
Rhacel Parreñas,
University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational
Families in the New Global Economy
Geraldine Pratt, University
of British Columbia
Family Values, Leaky Bodies, and Double Standards: Filipina Domestic
Workers in Vancouver Canada
Jude Fernando, Arizona
International College
Politics of Sustainable Development in the Shadow of Capital:
Lessons from Micro-credit and Empowerment of Women
Saturday, April 6th
9:30 Coffee and Pastries
10-Noon Panel 4: Border Crossing
moderator: Arturo Gonzalez, University of Arizona
Guadalupe Castillo,
Pima Community College
Women at the Border
Raquel Rubio Goldsmith,
University of Arizona
The Arizona/Sonora Border: Impunity Zone
Eithne Luibheid
The 1875 Page Law: A Blueprint for the Sexual Regulation of Immigration
Noon-1 Lunch provided
1-3 Panel 5: Gender and Sexual Identity
moderator: Rosalía Solorzano, Pima Community College
Patricia Zavella, University
of California, Santa Cruz
Migration, Sexuality and Risk: Mexican Women Farmworkers in California
Norma Mogrovejo
Self-Exile, Political Exile, or Migration Due to Sexual Preference?
Nayan Shah, University
of California, San Diego
Migrant Governmentality, Sex and Space
3:30-5:30 Summary Session
moderators: Rosemary Hennessy, University at Albany, SUNY Radhika Mongia, University of California, Santa Cruz