The Yale Center for International and Area Studies (YCIAS) will sponsor a conference on Friday and Saturday, May 1 and 2, titled "Negotiating National Belonging: A Cross-Continental Dialogue on Displacement, Reincorporation and the Nation-State." The conference will be held in Rm. 203 in Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave. All sessions are free and open to the public.
At the conference, academics, lawyers, human rights experts, and United Nations representatives will examine the changing meaning of citizenship and nationality in the context of global flows of labor and capital, political unrest, genocide, economic restructuring, and policy changes.
While the conference will focus on migration and refugee movements in Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, it also brings together specialists on Asia and Europe to facilitate a cross-continental dialogue on the tensions between migration and national belonging. Participants will not only identify the major themes affecting migration in each region, but will examine how diverse social actors negotiate the experiences of displacement and return in different ways. Participants will explore how categories such as race, class, gender, age and ethnicity affect the ways people contend with processes of displacement and reincorporation.
There will be six sessions:
* "Repatriation and Resistance: The Experiences of Refugees in Central America and Central Africa," at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, will explore the implications of situations in which refugees and immigrants do not wish to return home despite strong pressure from national governments and international organizations.
* "Diasporas and Dual Nationality: Straddling National Boundaries," at 3:45 p.m. on Friday, will focus on cases where nations are trying to embrace their diasporic populations by offering dual citizenship or dual nationality.
* "Return and Reincorporation: Reasserting Claims of National Belonging," at 9 a.m. on Saturday, will examine what happens when displaced populations come home, and as a consequence assert claims to land, jobs, and rights as citizens.
* "Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: The Study of National Belonging in the Humanities," at 11 a.m. on Saturday, will highlight scholarly work on displacement, migration, and exile in comparative literature and the humanities.
* A roundtable on "Migration and Social Locations," at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, will look at how categories such as race, class, gender, age and ethnicity affect peoples experiences of displacement and migration.
* A roundtable on "Migration, Globalization and the Nation-State: Regional Perspectives," at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, will bring together scholars currently working on Africa, Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and Europe to review some of the major themes affecting immigrants, refugees and nation-states in these regions.
This conference is organized by the Global-Migration and the Nation-State unit of the "Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies" initiative funded by the Ford Foundation. For more information contact poornima.paidipaty@yale.edu.
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