This conference is jointly organized by COMPAS and the Oxford Diasporas Programme.

The Oxford Diasporas Programme draws together a number of projects looking at the social, economic, political and cultural impact of diasporas through a range of disciplinary perspectives and research methods.

The programme identifies three fundamental dynamics relating to the formation, maintenance, and impacts of diasporas:

Connecting: the way that diasporas create networks encompassing those back home, others in diaspora and, more widely, their imagined communities based on co-ethnicity or other identities.
Contesting: the contradictory processes of inclusion of diasporas within and exclusion from territorially-bound communities, and the emergence of potentially conflicting identities.
Converging: the way in which diasporic communities de-emphasize their origins and blend with indigenous or other migrant communities to create new social formations, cultures and practices.
This conference aims to integrate humanities and social science perspectives in order to investigate the impacts of these three dynamics of diaspora.