Category Archives: Seminar

Lunch seminar 20.09 with Maja Janmyr: Labelling Syrian refugees in Lebanon

ATTENTION: NEW DATE

The war in Syria has created a large flow of refugees into Lebanon. Maja Janmyr from the faculty of law at UiB has recently conducted a prolonged fieldwork among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. She joins IMER for our first lunch seminar this semester, in order to present some findings.

In this seminar, Janmyr will explore the various legal, bureaucratic and social labels that get attached to the refugees by humanitarian, state and local government actors. A wide array of labels are imposed; registered refugee, laborer, displaced, foreigner, and more. These labels carry with them implications for what a Syrian may do, and how her presence is understood by others in the community. The labels also influence what type of rights and protections she may have access to. Importantly, the emergence of labels in one arena often influences how and why another set of labels takes shape in another.

The seminar takes place at the seminar room at the ground floor of Sosiologisk institutt, Rosenberggaten 39, between 12.30 and 14.00. A lunch will be served.

Welcome!

Maja Janmyr is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Law at the University of Bergen.

Lunch seminar 23.05: The im/mobility of Afghan migrants in Europe

What happens with Afghan migrants after they have received a negative decision on their asylum application in Norway? This is the topic of our next IMER seminar, with Halvar Andreassen Kjærre.  For several years, Kjærre has followed a group of Afghan migrants around Europe. After their asylum application was rejected in Norway, he sought them out in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Denmark and Sweden.

This approach makes it possible to understand how various aspects of the migrant’s lives change over time, and between different places in their migration trajectories. Identity, living conditions, social status, legal status, social relations, and desires and hopes are not constant. All of this changes along with their journeys. Following mobile people over time also gives insights into their migratory tactics, and the burden that is imposed upon them by different sovereign states.

The seminar takes place at the seminar room at the ground floor of Sosiologisk institutt, Rosenberggaten 39 the 23rd of may 2017 at 12.30. A light lunch will be served.

 

IMG_7137Halvar Andreassen Kjærre is a PhD candidate at IMER Bergen / Department of social Anthropology (UiB). His main field of interest is irregular migration, asylum regimes, migration control and mobility studies. The topic of his PhD thesis is the intra-European mobility of Afghan migrants in Europe.

Lunch seminar – Times of migration: Un/documented lives in Europe

Migration has most often been studied as a spatial process – some people move from one place to another place. But recent research also points to the dimension of time as crucial to the experience of migration. Christine Jacobsen, head of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at UiB, is now leading the WAIT-project (Waiting for an uncertain future: The temporalities of irregular migration). This research project aims to unpack the temporalities of ‘irregular migration’. Particular attention will be paid to the socially produced condition of prolonged waiting. The project also looks into how migrants encounter, explore and resist such waiting experiences.

In this seminar Jacobsen will present the WAIT project, and also present preliminary findings from ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille. Based on this, she will offer some initial theoretical reflections on waiting, hope and uncertainty.

The seminar takes place in the Seminar Room at the Department of Sociology, Rosenberggata 39, on the 4th of April from 12.30 to 14.00.

A lunch will be served. Welcome!

Christine JacobsenChristine Jacobsen is head of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at UiB.

Seminar – Ordinary Icons: Public discourses, policy worlds and everyday lives

In what ways do public discourses shape everyday lives, and how can we research these connections? For this seminar, Anouk de Koning comes to IMER to present findings from fieldwork in Amersterdam and Antwerp, through the concept ‘ordinary iconic figures’. Such iconic figures can be the US “welfare queen”, white Dutch “Henk and Ingrid”, or the Belgian “Flemish Interest voter”. Such iconic figures are part and parcel of public discourses, but are also taken up in policy worlds and everyday interactions. Tracing how such figures resurface in policy practices and urban lives provides insight into the connections between public discourses and everyday lives.

Coffee and tea will be served.

20161122_154709_0447Anouk de Koning is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University.

Seminar 15.02: Acculturation of South Asian Families in Three Diasporic Films

How are diaspora populations from South Asia portrayed in popular culture?  Sándor Klapscic explores this question by looking at three autobiographical films: East is East, Bend it like Beckham, and West is West. To what extent do the characters hold on to their original culture, and to what extent do they accept the new culture and the host community’s values? Through a detailed analysis of these films, Klapscik argues that filmic analysis can help us to shed light on acculturation processes in diaspora communities.

The seminar takes place in the Seminar Room at the Department of Sociology, Rosenberggata 39, on the 15th of February from 14.15 to 16.00.

62_5665a1ead12a4Sándor Klapcsik is assistant professor at the Technical University of Liberect. He is a guest researcher at IMER Bergen in February.

Lunch seminar 14.02: Transmission of values between generations

Are values transmitted from one generation to the other, or do they change? Are there differences between groups in how values are transmitted between generations? For this lunch seminar, Rebecca Dyer Ånensen will present findings from her PhD-project, which is part of a larger study on the transition to adulthood in Norway and the UK. The broader study looks at three-generation families, and investigates the transmission of values between these generations. Ånensen’s project adds an immigrant perspective, by investigating inter-generational value transmission in families of immigrant origin (from Pakistan and Vietnam). How does the transmission of values look in these families, and how does it compare with the transmission of values in families from majority population?

The seminar takes place at the seminar room at Sosiologisk institutt, Rosenberggata 39, from 12.30 to 14.00. A lunch will be served.

picture-20739-1432818668Rebecca Dyer Ånensen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, UiB.

Lunch seminar 17.01: Migrant care workers in Norwegian nursing homes

It’s time for IMER’s first lunch seminar in 2017! This time, we will be joined by Mai Camilla Munkejord who will present findings from a pilot study on migrant care workers in Finnmark from 2015.

Migrant care workers are becoming increasingly numerous and important as staff members in Norwegian nursing homes. This is not least the case in rural areas such as Finnmark, where the out-migration of younger people is more pressing than in urban areas. How do the immigrant care workers experience their situation?

In her presentation, she will draw on Floya Anthias’  ‘translocational’ perspective. How do interconnections between social divisions such as gender, ethnicity, class, mobility and geography shape the experiences of the immigrant care workers?

The seminar will take place at the seminar room at the ground floor of Sosiologisk institutt, Rosenbergsgt. 39, from 12.30 to 14. A lunch will be surved.

 

Mai Camilla MunkejordMai Camilla Munkejord works as a Research professor (forsker I) at the Uni Research Rokkan Centre in Bergen and as a Professor at the Dept of Child Welfare and Social Work at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway (UiT AUN).

 

 

Lunch seminar 13.12: Studying public debate on immigration

How is immigration covered in the media? In public debates, different narratives can be found. Are the media focusing on problems and scapegoating minorities? Or are they rather painting a rosy and “politically correct” picture of migration and multicultural society? Is one of these narratives more correct than the others, or do both hold a grain of truth?

Such questions – and many more – will be explored in the ambitious new research project SCANPUB: The Immigration Issue in Scandinavian in Scandinavian Public Spheres 1970-2015. This projects attempts to describe how immigration has been discussed in Norway, Sweden and Denmark since the 70s. Futhermore, it attempts to explain why the media in the Scandinavian countries have covered this issue in different ways. For our last lunch seminar in 2016, head researcher Jostein Gripsrud is coming to IMER in order to the present the project, together with his associates Hilmar Mjelde and Jan Fredrik Hovden.

The seminar takes place in the seminar room at the ground floor of Sosiologisk Institutt, Rosenbergsgt. 39, on the 13th of December, from 12.30 to 14.00.

A lunch will be served. Welcome!

Jostein Gripsrud is professor at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. He has led several large researched projects, and has published a wide range of books on media and culture.

IMER lunch seminar: Cindy Horst – Active citizenship in culturally and religiously diverse societies.

May 26, 2015 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm @ UNI Rokkan centre (6 etg), Nygårdsgaten 5, Bergen

In debates on citizenship in Europe, the need for active participation  among citizens is increasingly stressed. But do normative ideas of what active citizenship is, reflect people’s lived experiences in present-day Europe? While the low electoral participation of young people is often highlighted as an indication of reduced civic participation, various studies show increased social media use leads to increased political and social debates and mobilization. And while politicians often lament the lack of civil-political engagement among immigrants particularly, many new citizens volunteer, work as activists, take up political causes, or set up associations in both their countries of residence and origin. In Europe’s culturally and religiously diverse societies, citizens have different frameworks for how they act and interact with their close and distant surroundings. The ACT project studies this diversified citizen participation through empirical data collection on (local, national and transnational) active citizenship in neighbourhoods in Oslo and Copenhagen.

Skjermbilde 2015-02-17 kl. 22.33.04Cindy Horst is Research Director and Research Professor in Migration and Refugee Studies at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Her current research interests include: mobility in conflict; diaspora; humanitarianism; refugee protection; (transnational) civic engagement; and theorizing on social transformation.

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IMER Lunch: Astrid Ouahyb Sundsbø – Social mixing policies: What You Want and What You Get

Friday 13.03.15 12.00-13.30 @ UNI Rokkan centre, Nygårdsgaten 5, Bergen (6 etg)

In the publSkjermbilde 2015-02-13 kl. 09.15.27ic debate and contemporary social policies in Norway as well as in other countries, concentrations of “immigrants” in certain areas of a city are considered to be unfortunate and something which needs to be fought against (see i.e. Gakkestad 2003; Akerhaug 2012). It is anticipated that spatial concentrations of “immigrants” enforces the social isolation of “immigrants” and triggers criminal activities, among other aspects. This becomes very obvious when a “high percentage of immigrants” in an area serves as basis for referring to that area as a “ghetto” or “insecure” (see i.e. Sæter 2005; Vassenden: 2007; cf. Akerhaug 2012).

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