The Migration Studies Society
The MIGRATION STUDIES SOCIETY aims to connect people in Oxford examining any facet of migration and cultural pluralism and build dialogue and relationships across disciplines and affiliations, by organising forums for socializing, resource and information sharing, and research support.
Society members include students and researchers from the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), the International Migration Institute (IMI), anthropology, politics, history, geography, and sociology. Organization is conducted at weekly open meetings by a planning committee drawn from Society members.
Projects include regular social events, weekly newsletters, website building, research presentation seminars, publications, and special events such as speakers, field trips, workshops, and inter-university conferences and exchanges.
Details of recent previous graduate seminar series can be found here.
Oxford Graduate Migration Research Seminar: Michaelmas 2009
Convened by Thomas Gaff, Sahana Ghosh, Hiranthi, Jayaweera, & Stephanie J. Silverman
Mondays 13.00 - 14.00
Seminar Room, Pauling Centre, 58a Banbury Road, except for 19 October and 2 November
This is an informal seminar: please feel free to bring lunch
The Migration Studies Society can be reached at migsoc@herald.ox.ac.uk
12 October
Alevis in Europe: Struggling for Visibility Abroad to Struggle against Blindness at Home
Besim Can Zirh (PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, UCL)
19 October
Building the Infrastructure for the Observance of Refugee Rights in the Global South
Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond, Founder, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford
*64 BANBURY ROAD with complimentary reception
26 October
From Tribe to Faction: Cultural Politics in Palestine
Lisa Welze, DPhil Candidate in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford
2 November
Speaking Austrian German in Great Britain, or The ‘Sketchiness’ of the Mother Tongue
Isabel Schropper, PhD Candidate, The IGRS, London
*64 BANBURY ROAD with complimentary reception
9 November
Persecution during armed conflicts
Vanessa Holzer, PhD Candidate, Law Faculty of Goethe University
16 November
Religious Values and Post-Conflict Healing: An interdisciplinary study of resilient survivors of the Khmer Rouge
Gwyn Overland , Research fellow, University of Agder, Institute for Religion, Ethics, and Society
23 November
Ties That Bind? Political economy, humanitarian norms, and immigration
Aubrey Westfall, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado
30 November
Elizabeth Frantz, PhD Candidate in the Dept of Anthropology at the London School of Economics
Michaelmas Series 2009 Abstracts
12 October
Alevis in Europe: Struggling for Visibility Abroad to Struggle against Blindness at Home
Besim Can Zirh (PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, UCL)
In 1993, members of the Alevi minority gathered outside of Cologne’s Dom Cathedral to protest the so-called Sivas Incidents in Turkey. Nearly fifteen years after this first “coming out”, 50,000 Alevis gathered in the same place to protest an episode, “To Whom Honour is Due”, of the well-known German television series, Tatort. The Alevi Federation of Germany organized this demonstration to fall on 30 December 2007, only one week after the episode was broadcast. In this paper, I will focus on the so-called Tatort affair as a case through which we can analyse both the transnational characteristics of the Alevi movement today as well as its struggle for recognition in Turkey.
I will locate the demonstration in a historical background against which Alevism has been redefined and restructured both by outside actors, and as a result of diverse struggles and negotiations on local, national, and transnational levels. Having emerged at the end of the 1980s, the Alevi movement in Europe has gradually transformed Alevism from an invisible local identity into a visible transnational political identity subject to international scrutiny. I map this development broadly across three epochs: leaving home and losing home (from the 1950s to 1980); desiring home (from 1980 to 1993); transforming home (since 1993 - 2007); and the emerging period of contesting home (2007 - present).
19 October
Building the Infrastructure for the Observance of Refugee Rights in the Global South
Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond, Founder, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford
Refugees in the Global South face many serious violations of their rights. Several major host states have failed to ratify both the Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol. However, even among those states that have ratified one or both, few have enacted the domestic legislation to implement the provisions, and no state in the South has made a serious effort to bring domestic law in other subjects – immigration, health, labour, education – into harmony with the rights of refugees and their international commitments.
This article presents a multi-faceted proposal, a guide to building a new global infrastructure for the protection of refugees. An important precursor is a rapid expansion in the teaching and studying of refugee law. Today’s students of refugee issues are tomorrow’s researchers, lawyers, and scholars, all of which are desperately needed to help refugees navigate the process of status determination and resettlement, to advocate more generally for the rights of refugees, and to monitor states’ compliance with international obligations. Also, human rights NGOs need to embrace the fact that refugees are human beings, and refugee rights are human rights. Furthermore, advocacy groups, legal aid organizations, and other NGOs need to understand that advocacy, legal assistance, and research must go hand in hand: the provision of legal assistance to individual refugees not only makes the use of their life stories for research and advocacy more ethical, it improves the quality of the research and advocacy as well. Perhaps most importantly, all the groups working with refugees throughout the South must communicate with and assist each other.
In an effort to facilitate this crucial networking and communication, sixteen refugee advocacy and legal aid NGOs from the South attended a five-day workshop in Nairobi in January 2007. The group decided to form the Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network, and to produce a charter for membership. I have been acting as the group’s moderator informally since that time. In the coming months, SRLAN will attach itself to Fahamu, an advocacy NGO that publishes Africa’s largest circulation magazine and has a proven track record of facilitating emerging advocacy networks. Fahamu will do fearless advocacy, often too dangerous for individual NGOs, and the SRLAN will facilitate the communication and co-operation necessary to begin the construction of the new global infrastructure for the protection of refugees. Working together, as a network of organizations throughout the South, we truly can transform this broken and unjust system.
26 October
From Tribe to Faction: Cultural Politics in Palestine
Lisa Welze, DPhil Candidate in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford
This paper examines the ways in which political allegiances have formed among Palestinian refugee communities in the Occupied Territories. Particularly, I consider how refugee populations have forged unique political networks to address everyday political grievances and how these allegiances have impacted national politics. Specifically, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas has been effective in recruiting supporters from within the refugee population. Through their involvement with issues faced by Palestinians at the local level, Hamas was able to gain increasing support from political moderates, and subsequently popularity for their national program. Based on 20 months of field research in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jordan, this paper explores the mechanisms that have been instrumental to the success of social and political networks in Palestine.
2 November
Speaking Austrian German in Great Britain, or The ‘Sketchiness’ of the Mother Tongue
Isabel Schropper, PhD Candidate, The IGRS, London
In the course of my doctoral thesis Austrian female migration to Britain, 1945-1960 I interviewed 50 Austrian women, who came to Britain as war brides, textile workers, domestics or as au pairs. They spent most of their working life here, brought up their children, built homes, made friends and established themselves in their British communities. How assimilated these women have become is not only apparent by the lives they live but also the language they speak. In fact only 22% chose to give their oral accounts in Austrian German. The observation of this behaviour of the Austrian migrants can lead to the assumption that nowadays they identify more with Great Britain, and in return that their bond to Austria has become less strong. This raises the question what relevance the mother tongue plays now in the lives of the interviewees and if the absence or sketchiness can be regarded as an indicator to what extent these women identify with their Austrian roots. But maybe the interviewees’ preference of English over Austrian German can simply be ascribed to their early years in Britain. Particularly in post-war Britain German speaking migrants probably desired nothing more than to ‘blend in’, ergo speak the language of their new home country as quickly and correctly as possible.
In my paper I will discuss the relevance of the Austrian German to the former migrants by exploring their motives for cultivating or neglecting their mother tongue. Furthermore, I will present the strategies these former Austrian migrants developed to learn English, what methods they applied to preserve their mother tongue and if they passed on their linguistic heritage to their children. By providing examples from my own research and contrasting them with findings from studies on German migrants to Britain after the war, I will demonstrate the importance of language acquisition within the assimilation context of migrants and the possible effects this can have on the preservation of the mother tongue.
9 November
Persecution during armed conflicts
Vanessa Holzer, PhD Candidate, Law Faculty of Goethe University
This presentation is based on a chapter of my doctoral thesis. The thesis examines the meaning and scope of the refugee definition in Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention in times of armed conflict. The presentation analyses the notion of persecution during armed conflicts from the perspective of international law. While armed conflicts are the main cause of forced migration, people who had to leave home because of hostilities often face difficulties in having their claim for refugee status recognized. In its decision in Adan v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, for instance, the House of Lords found that a Somali who escaped from clan warfare did not qualify for refugee status. A person who fled from generalized violence without being persecuted does not fulfil the key criterion of the refugee definition. But the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ illustrates that persecution does happen during armed conflicts. Refugee status determination must thus differentiate between the indiscriminate effects of hostilities and instances of persecution. What guidance does international law provide in this respect? The presentation firstly discusses the limits of human rights law which, although commonly used to interpret persecution, is of restricted applicability in armed conflicts. Secondly, it scrutinizes the potentials and risks of incorporating the laws of armed conflict into the understanding of persecution. It ends with a proposal on how to conceptualize persecution during armed conflicts in line with international law.
16 November
Religious Values and Post-Conflict Healing: An interdisciplinary study of resilient survivors of the Khmer Rouge
Gwyn Overland , Research fellow, University of Agder, Institute for Religion, Ethics, and Society
This paper deals with one of the intersections of welfare and religion in late modern societies: the meeting of a European health service (Norway) with refugees from countries with strong religious traditions. It reports from an on-going project, Trauma and Resilience - a Refugee Perspective, which directs “the salutogenetic question” - not, why are these people sick, but why are they healthy? - to three samples of survivors of the Khmer rouge period. The samples are drawn from populations who 1) were exposed to traumatic events, but 2) did not develop a disabling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Sociological analyses of these refugees’ accounts seek to discover, understand, and explain mechanisms that successful survivors found instrumental for their survival after traumatic stress, in order to bring new knowledge to the study of resilience and impulses to the practice of psychosocial rehabilitation of survivors. Strong tendencies in the findings suggest that for many, religious worldview, values, and practices play a major role in their survival and normalization. How may this be taken into account by the public health and social services?
23 November
Ties That Bind? Political economy, humanitarian norms, and immigration
Aubrey Westfall, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado
Family migration accounts for the majority of migrant movement to the developed world. These large immigrant flows are politically justified by the individual right to respect for family life and recognition of the family as the foundation of a healthy society. While most immigration is largely driven by domestic concerns, family immigration has an international-normative graft that should produce consistently different outcomes across states when compared to other forms of migration. Developed states and particularly the European Union share a uniquely enforceable foundation of individual rights law, and should hypothetically converge towards common family reunion provisions. However, we continue to witness divergence in family reunification policy outcomes. This project questions the premise of rights universality across OECD and European states and argues differences in country-level sociopolitical respect for individual rights are the primary explanation for variation in family reunification policy. An environment of respect for individual rights ought to interact with domestic attitudes, political considerations, and economic concerns to influence the degree of permissiveness in immigration policy and practice. This project uses Ordinary Least Squares models to reveal broad mechanisms at work in immigration policy formation across the European Union and OECD countries through comparing the determinants of family, refugee, and labor migration policies. It then engages in detailed case analysis in the UK, France, Germany and Sweden to illustrate most important family migration policy determinants within national contexts.
30 November
Reforming Rustic Ways: Sri Lanka's Housemaid Training Programme and the Role of the State in Promoting Women's Migration for Domestic Service
Elizabeth Frantz, PhD Candidate in the Dept of Anthropology at the London School of Economics
Since the 1980s, the Sri Lankan government has promoted women's migration for domestic work in the Middle East by training potential recruits in pre-departure courses run by the Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE). The training is intended to equip women from rural areas with the skills necessary to work in 'modern', affluent households abroad. It was hoped that this would reduce their exposure to abuse and non-payment of wages. The training has been compulsory for all women migrating overseas as housemaids since 1996, and more than 30,000 women complete the course each year at centres across the island. This paper analyses the training programme and, through it, the government's role in promoting migration for domestic work. The author argues that, in addition to pragmatic advice about housekeeping, the training involves lessons in servility and subservience. While the training was initiated to protect migrants from abuse and exploitation, by emphasising unquestioning obedience and docility, it may have the opposite effect.
This paper is based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Sri Lanka and Jordan between July 2006 and August 2008. The research involved in-depth interviews and informal discussions with Jordanian employers, Sri Lankan domestic workers and Sri Lankan embassy officials in Jordan. It also draws on interviews with prospective and returned migrants in Sri Lanka. The author attended a 13-day housemaid training course at the Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment's main training facility in Colombo, where the greatest numbers of new recruits are trained. She also interviewed training center staff and conducted a survey of 245 women attending housemaid training programmes at several other facilities throughout the island.