Teaching migration history in an age of border restriction
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Thursday 5th June 2025, 6.00- 7.30pm followed by a wine reception
Room B20, Birkbeck main building, Malet Street, London WC1E 7JL
Book here (TeachMigHist.eventbrite.co.uk)
The first quarter of the twenty-first century has seen a relentless rise in anti-migration politics. Across much of the world, nationalist voices propagating fears of ‘invasion’ by foreigners have prompted governments, of right and left alike, to implement ever-harsher immigration restrictions and increasingly militarised border regimes. Yet public attitudes towards migration have remained much more positive than the restrictionist consensus amongst politicians suggests. Moreover, increasing popular interest has led to a growing number of university courses on migration history, accompanied by a rich array of academic and popular texts on the subject. There is therefore an increasingly stark disjuncture between political and media discourses on migration and what students and the wider public are eager to discover.
How should universities respond to these tensions? What practical and intellectual challenges and opportunities do they present? How far should the study of migration history be informed by the controversies of today? How, in short, do we teach migration history in the current moment? This event will bring together an international panel of practitioners in migration history to consider these questions.
Participants:
Thomas Jones is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Buckingham and a member of the RSHC. He has published widely on the history of asylum, was a founding member of the Barriers and Borders project, and teaches immigration history at Buckingham, where he is launching a new MA in Migration History.
Stéphanie Prévost is a Senior Lecturer at the Université de Paris Cité. She co-chairs the History & Politics section of the research group Échelles, where she has sponsored several projects dedicated to the history of migration. She has taught the subject at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Marie Ruiz is an Associate Professor at Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens. She and is co-chair of the Women on the Move public course on women’s migration history and directed a documentary on the same subject. She produced an Erasmus Blended Intensive Programme on migration theories, and has published widely on Victorian emigration.
Joseph Viscomi is a senior lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. Trained as a historian and anthropologist, his primary research interests are in the social, political and environmental histories of migration, as well as in theories of historical time and temporality. Joseph is the Birkbeck Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre.
Facilitated by the Raphael Samuel History Centre.
For information contact Katy k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk
Contact name:
Katy Pettit