Migrant Civic Practice in Times of Crisis Symposium
Date: 3rd December 2021
Time: 8:45am - 3:00pm
Location: online event, via Zoom.
Register: please register for this event via the Eventbrite page.
About the Event
During these times of unprecedented and intertwined global crises of health, environment and economy, there are new calls for representation and renewed forms of political and social action forming from the margins in many countries of migrant settlement. These include crucial migrant contributions to the public sphere through volunteering, social media mobilisation and frontline medical services amongst others. Simultaneously, rising anti- immigration politics and crises of ‘re-bordering’, like the de-regionalisation of Brexit or the COVID19 global pandemic, are dramatically impacting the lives of migrants globally and making their political action evermore risky and their civic lives increasingly precarious. Despite this, analyses of migrant civic engagement and political practice often remain narrowly framed within specific migrant rights discourses or analyses of ‘homeland’ diaspora politics. Both the everyday and the formalised ways in which migrants, both individually and collectively, more broadly respond to crisis, enact civic identities and reshape civic life at local, national and transnational scales often remain hidden.
In the context of multiplying and intensifying modes of global crisis, this symposium showcases research that conceptually and/or empirically engage with migrant experiences of multiple forms of civic practice, broadly understood as the situated acts of participation in a community, whether local, transnational or global.
