Description

Talking Circles offer an opportunity to meet other delegates with similar interests and concerns. Delegates self-select into groups based on broad thematic areas and then engage in extended discussion about the issues and concerns they feel are of utmost importance to that segment of the Research Network. Participation is open, encouraged, and supported.

How Do They Work?

The Talking Circles are grouped around each of the conference themes so discussions can focus on the specific areas of interest represented by each theme. 

How to Begin:

Allow members of the group to briefly introduce themselves. 

The facilitator should encourage open dialogue and ensure a collegial and respectful conversation. 

Starting Questions to Assist Discussion

Talking Circle: Who are we?

What is the territory, or scope, or landscape of this thematic area?

What are the burning issues, the key questions for this theme?

What are the forces or drivers that will affect us as professionals, thinkers, citizens, and aware and concerned people whose focus is this particular theme?

What are the future directions (in research, in theory-building, in practice) for this thematic area?

2024 Special Focus—The World on the Move: Understanding Migration in a New Global Age

Few things shape our world more profoundly than migration. While some see migration as hardwired into humans, processes of globalization have intensified the speed and impact of migratory flows by establishing evermore connections between faraway places. Millions of people migrate every year, both within countries, usually from rural to urban areas, and across national borders, within and between the Global South and the Global North. Migration is motivated by a multitude of reasons – including a search for a better livelihood, escape from political instability or a flee from religious persecution. Broader structural and environmental factors, notably climate change, increasingly act as triggers of migration. Related to those motives, questions about who can arrive and who cannot are highly contested political issues, with the so-called “refugee crisis” galvanizing the public debate, which is increasingly polarized between those, especially on the political right, who want to keep the borders of their countries impenetrable to potential arrivals, and those who welcome the desperate and the needy as well as the entrepreneurial nomads. Of course, as people migrate so does capital, culture, ideas and ways of thinking, resulting in a creative, if sometimes volatile cross-pollination, between societies, economies and value systems, disrupting Western-centric modes of knowledge production. The debate about migration thus turns into one concerning social change as such. But while the world is on the move, social sciences have not yet overcome the “methodological nationalism” (Beck 2007) that keeps scholars ill-prepared to identify and analyse the diverse, hybrid and creolized nature of much of human interactions today. This conference aims to capture the implications of migration – of people and ideas – in politics, economy and culture. It challenges what scholars have called the “sedentary bias” (Bakewell 2008) and instead takes migration as a given, a defining feature of the globalizing world. The questions that we hope to address include but are not limited to the following issues:

• Migration in a historical perspective

• Globalization and migration, is ours a different age?

• International migration and economic development – North and South

• Environmental change and migration

• Ideologies of migration – how is migration viewed and contested from different ideological viewpoints, left, right and centre?

• Moral panics around migration, others, “aliens”; racism and anti-immigration populism on the far right

• Legacies of migration – models and realities of cultural diversity

• Political regimes of migration – policies and their consequences

• Debates about migration and welfare state

• Global governance of migration

• Global cities and migration – urban superdiversity and conviviality

• Pro-refugee and migrant activism

• Paradoxes of immigrants’ political mobilizations: emancipatory struggles vs. migrants’ involvement in far-right politics