Month: August 2017

Dublin Arts Council – Urur Dhex-Dhexaad Ah: Community In-Between

Dublin Arts Council is presenting Urur Dhex-Dhexaad Ah: Community In-Between, a photography exhibition featuring 15 central Ohio Somali trailblazers, as the first iteration in a three-year project exploring immigration, integration and identity. Portraits created by two female Somali high school students and other community photographers will be accompanied by written and video personal narratives, artifacts and oral histories delivered by augmented reality.
 
The exhibit runs until November 3 at The Dublin Arts Council, 7125 Riverside Dr., Dublin, Ohio

Kathryn Metz – “Resilience in the Face of Exclusion: Refugees and Migrants on the Closed Balkan Route.”

Check out the latest blog post by Kathryn Metz from the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, OSU, “Resilience in the Face of Exclusion: Refugees and Migrants on the Closed Balkan Route.”

“What is left of the so-called Balkan Route? The path taken by hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees in the summer of 2015 has been effectively closed off with border fences and increased police presence along the borders of Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia.

In 2015, the Western Balkan countries viewed themselves as a transit zone; the path that migrants took as they attempted to enter the European Union. However, with the closure of borders in 2016, tens of thousands have been trapped on the fringes of the European Union in the Balkans for over a year, and the possibilities for reaching Western Europe are increasingly limited.”

Read more on the Center for Slavic and East European Studies website.

THE SPACES OF CITIZENSHIP: MAPPING PERSONAL AND COLONIAL HISTORIES

Global Mobility Project graduate student associate Eleanor Paynter’s article “THE SPACES OF CITIZENSHIP: MAPPING PERSONAL AND COLONIAL HISTORIES IN CONTEMPORARY ITALY IN IGIABA SCEGO’S LA MIA CASA È DOVE SONO (MY HOME IS WHERE I AM)” was recently published in the EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF LIFE WRITING.

ABSTRACT: As Italy has changed from emigration country to immigration destination, the growing body of literature by migrant and second generation writers plays an important role in connecting discourses on race and national identity with the country’s increasing diversity and its colonial past. This essay investigates the 2010 memoir La Mia Casa È Dove Sono (My Home is Where I Am) by Igiaba Scego, the daughter of Somali immigrants, as life writing that responds to these changing demographics and, more broadly, to the migration trends affecting contemporary Europe. The self Scego constructs through her narration integrates her Roman identity and Somali background as the narrative returns colonial history to Italian public discourse and public space. I argue that by narrating the personal and historical in the context of Roman monuments and neighborhoods, Scego’s memoir challenges and redefines who can be “Italian,” modeling a more inclusive Italianità. I discuss the memoir in terms of its use of collective memory and its development of a narrative “I” that claims a position within a collective identity while challenging the exclusionary tendencies of that very group.

Read the full article here: http://ejlw.eu/article/view/193

The Migration Conference 2017 Programme now available

The 2017 Migration Conference will take place in Athens, Greece from August 23rd to 26th, 2017. The Conference will be a forum for discussion where experts, young researchers and students, practitioners and policy makers working in the field of migration are encouraged to exchange their knowledge.

For those interested in the event, the programme is now available on their website at http://migrationcenter.org/programme