CfP: DAMR/IMES Fall Meeting

CALL FOR PAPERS – DAMR/IMES FALL MEETING

The Dutch Association for Migration Research (DAMR) invites paper abstracts for its Fall Meeting, co- hosted by the UvA Institute for Migration Studies (IMES):

Challenging Categorization in Migration Policy and Research

27 October 2017, Roeterseilandcampus, University of Amsterdam

With a keynote by Prof. Dr. Dvora Yanow, Wageningen University

Policy categories are central to state power to sort, differentiate, include, and exclude. In a migration context, categorizations are used to mark and ascribe belonging, deservingness, ‘willingness to integrate’ or ‘migration background’. Often these labels follow binary logics and do no justice to complex situations and identities. Migration scholars are often confronted with the challenge to analyze or criticize policy categories with scientific categories. The interdisciplinary field of Migration and Ethnic Studies has scrutinized categorizations in different contexts. Scholarship has highlighted the socially constructed nature of categories, and approaches such as intersectionality, superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007), groupness and groupism (Brubaker 2002), and demigranticization (Dahinden 2016) stress categories’ complexity and fluidity. Yet, these critical approaches cannot provide category- free scholarship. How are we to deal with categories in our own work, so as to avoid essentialist and simplistic distinctions?

The DAMR/IMES Fall Meeting aims to bring together research that challenges categories of policy and practice,aswellascategoriesofanalysisincurrentmigrationresearch.

Papers can focus on but are not limited to questions like:

  • What are the dynamics and effects of categorization in migration policy and research?
  • How are research categories and policy categories connected, and what are theconsequences of these connections?
  • How can migration research study and scrutinize existing categories of policy, practice andanalysis?
  • What is the role of academics in the (re)production of categories?
  • Does more complexity lead to better categorization?
  • How to balance different indicators of good categorization in migration research?(transparency, precision, consistency, resonance, …?)

    Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to L.M.Klarenbeek@uva.nl, before May 28th. We also ask you to include one or two questions for discussion, based on your abstract.

    References:

    Brubaker, Rogers. 2002. “Ethnicity without Groups.” European Journal of Sociology 43 (2): 163–89. Dahinden, Janine. 2016. “A Plea for the ‘ de-Migranticization’ of Research on Migration and Integration.” Ethnic and Racial Studies.
    Vertovec, Steven. 2012. “‘Diversity’ and the Social Imaginary.” European Journal of Sociology 53(3): 287–312.