Welcome to the latest COMPAS Update

Please find below the latest COMPAS Update on all our recent research activities, events and publications, as well as plans for the future.

This email contains hyperlinks which are highlighted in blue and will open in new windows. If you have difficulty following the links, please visit our online version at:
http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/updates/
 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Citizenship and Integration in the UK

The Citizenship and Integration in the UK project, funded by the European Integration Fund and led by COMPAS with Birbeck, University of London, is due to report in the coming weeks. The project included a large-scale survey of new British citizens, as well as in-depth interviews with a smaller sample. It has found very high levels of identification with Britishness from the new citizens it contacted. Two major migrant pathways to integration are emerging in the data: a pathway involving migrants setting down strong roots in local urban communities and developing a strong identification with their local areas, including mixing with others at the school gate; and a pathway involving migrants settling in neighbourhoods with fewer migrants and interacting heavily with residents from other backgrounds, both at work and in the community.

Migration and Criminality

Migration scholars and NGOs have often sought to break down popular associations between criminality and immigration: migrants are not criminals, nor are they necessarily more likely to commit crime. Nevertheless the association of illegal immigration and crime has a strong hold on the public imagination, and it is important to understand why this might be. In fact there are important relationships between immigration and criminality: both ‘immigrant’ and ‘criminal’ are important administrative categories for states, and comprise groups upon whom the state can exercise significant degrees of coercion; both are racialised, gendered and classed. There are also historical continuities: mobility has long been associated with criminality, through vagabondage and the problem of ‘masterless men’, gypsies and Roma, and ‘illegal immigrants’. New cluster work on citiszenship and belongng has begun to theorise how both are set in opposition to the (good) citizen, revealing the importance of the nation as a community of value as well as a community comprised of formal citizens.

Labor Shortages and U.S

Phil Martin and Martin Ruhs have recently published Labor Shortages and U.S. Immigration Reform: Promises and Perils of an Independent Commission in International Migration Review (45: 174–87). This article reviews the decisions governments face when employers request migrant workers, Britain’s independent Migration Advisory Committee, and the promises and perils of a similar U.S. commission to manage labor migration. The authors conclude that a U.S. commission could help to clarify the trade-offs involved in migrant labor policy, but cannot replace the need for inherently political choices between competing policy objectives.

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

Filling the Gaps on the Impacts of Migration

Seminar Series Trinity 2011
Convened by Carlos Vargas Silva

Thursdays 14.00 - 15.30, From 5th May to 23rd June
To be held at the Pauling Centre, 58a Banbury Road, Oxford

Click here for the full programme. 

Please note planned for the 16th June has been cancelled.

COMPAS Breakfast Briefings

Topical, cutting edge research on migration and migration related issues is provided in an accessible format for policy makers and other research users. These events are by invitation only, but podcasts of previous presentations are available now.

Forthcoming Briefings are:

Friday 10 June: Where is the UK going on migrant integration policy? A comparison to Europe and North America

Friday 8 July: Who are the UK's new citizens?

These briefings will complete the series and a new programme of briefings will be launched in the autumn.

COMPAS Photo Competition 2011 now launched

'Traces of Belonging'

For this year’s photography competition COMPAS is looking for images that reflect the theme of ‘Traces of Belonging’. We are particularly interested in images with a historical or social connotation that visually convey what it means to settle in a new place. Prizes: £300 and £150 for winning entries and £50 for 8 runners-up

Enter online by 13th October 2011 at:http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/events/photo-competition/

Call for papers: Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space

The intensification of global flows in the current period has led scholars to describe cities like London as 'super-diverse': a 'diversification of diversity', with a population characterised by multiple ethnicities, countries of origin, immigration statuses, and age profiles (Vertovec 2007). The aims of this conference (to be held on 22 - 23 September 2011) are: to address the missing dimension of migration and mobility in the literature on urban space, and the missing dimension of spatiality in the literature on diversity; and to develop new modes of inquiry appropriate to the contemporary challenge of super-diversity.

We invite proposals for papers which investigate aspects related to the conference themes. Further abstract submission details. Submission deadline - 6 June.

Mapping Turkish International Migration Studies: Old Questions, New Challenges

Turkish Migration Studies Group (TurkMiS)  Inaugural seminar and keynote lecture
22 June, Wednesday, 16:00 – 18:00, Oxford

Turkey has long been a major sending country of migrants and there are 3.7 million Turks and their descendants now living in the EU. At the same time Turkey has also become a receiving and transit country for significant numbers of migrants. The Turkish economy is amongst the fastest growing in the OECD, and Turkey is becoming a strong regional power. These and other issues will be explored by the newly founded Turkish Migration Studies group. This seminar will present state of the art of research and is the first of a new series. Agenda. Enquiries should be directed to Cansu Akbas or Franck Düvell

COMPAS DPhil Workshop

On Friday, 17 June, 12-6pm, COMPAS will host a DPhil workshop on four doctoral presentations on Muslims in Britain, Afghan Diasporas, Mumbai's ex-mill workers and Hmong diaspora. If you are interested in attending all or any part of the event, please email marisa.macari@anthro.ox.ac.uk or kristen.biehl@anthro.ox.ac.uk so that we may register you -- for catering purposes.

RECENT EVENTS

Diaspora Studies: Past, Present and Promise

On Thursday 2 June, 17:00 - 20:00 a Special Lecture and Drinks was held to launch the Oxford Diasporas Programme.

At this launch event Professor Robin Cohen, Director, International Migration Institute, introduced the Oxford Diasporas Programme, of which COMPAS is a lead partner. A keynote speech was given by Professor Khachig Tölölyan, Wesleyan University, and editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. A podcast of the keynote speech will soon be available.

Making Connections: Migration, Gender and Care Labour in Transnational Context

On 14-15 April, 2011 COMPAS held a conference that sought to develop connections between different aspects of the study of migrant care labour in transnational contexts: between state policies in care, migration and labour markets and the gendered and racialised divisions that shape these; in the relationship between both sending and receiving countries; and in the different scope and contexts of care work from so-called informal or unskilled home-based labour to the professional migration of, for example, nurses.

Visit the conference website

Astor Lecture 2011 The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Are Changing the US and Their Homeland

On 10th March 2010, Susan Eckstein (Professor of International Relations and Sociology, Boston University) gave the 2011Astor Lecture. Immigrant studies typically focus on contrasts between foreign-born and their progeny born where they resettle. This talk addressed how such analyses leave undocumented and unexplained differences among first generation immigrants, rooted in different pre-migration experiences. A podcast is now available of the lecture.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Publications

Brun, C and Van Hear, N. ’Shifting between the local and transnational: space, power and politics in war-torn Sri Lanka’ in Trysts with democracy: political practice in south Asia, eds , Stig Toft Madsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Uwe Skoda, London: Anthem, 2011. ISBN 9780857287731

Anderson, B., Sharma, N. and Wright, C. (eds.) (released 2011), "No Borders as Practical Politics", Special Issue, Refuge, Vol. 26. No. 2, Fall 2009

Van Hear, N. ’Diasporas, recovery and development in conflict-ridden societies’, in The Migration-Development-Nexus: A Transnational Perspective, edited by Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser and Peter Kivisto, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Walker, I. (2011), Hybridity, belonging, and mobilities: the intercontinental peripatetics of a transnational community. Population, Space and Place, 17: 167–178. doi: 10.1002/psp.609

New COMPAS Working Papers

WP-11-87
The Myth of ‘Weak Ties’ and the Ghost of the Polish Peasant: Informal Networks of Polish Post-Transition Migrants in the UK and Germany
Malgorzata Irek

WP-11-86
The Relationship between Immigration Status and Rights in the UK: Exploring the Rationale
Sarah Spencer and Jason Pobjoy

WP-11-85
Cast(e) in Bone: The Perpetuation of Social Hierarchy among Nepalis in Britain
Mitra Pariyar

WP-11-84
Polish Migration to the UK: Continuities and Discontinuities
Franck Düvell and Michal Garapich

WP-11-83
The Importance of Peers: Assimilation Patterns among Second-Generation Turkish Immigrants in Western Europe
Syed Ali and Tineke Fokkema

SELECTED NEWS

Keep up to date with what is happening with The Migration Observatory

Join the Observatory mailing list

Also visit News and Commentaries:  for latest commentaries on migration news and policy developments, press releases and the Observatory in the news items.

COMPAS Centre-linked student graduates

Kristina Krause successfully completed her DPhil in Social Anthropology. Kristina was associated with COMPAS via a centre-linked scholarship from the ESRC.

COMPAS is now on Twitter

Please follow what is happening at COMPAS on Twitter and Facebook

Funding awarded for digitising sound archives

Iain Walker has been awarded funding from the British Library Endangered Archives Programme for a major project to digitise the Comorian National Sound Archives.

We thank Alessio Cangiano

Alessio Cangiano is leaving COMPAS to become a Senior Lecturer in Demography at the School of Economics, University of South Pacific, Fiji. He will be teaching and researching population and migration issues in the Pacific region. He will also remain involved in COMPAS research as a Research Associate.

Deportation panel at BSA Conference

On 7th April 2011, Bridget Anderson and Nando Sigona were both panellists on a session called Deportation: theory and practice, examining the policy, theory, impact and reality of deportation on the lives of migrants in the UK and those who have been deported at the  British Sociological Association Annual Conference.

Contribution to Human Trafficking Inquiry

Bridget Anderson addressed a seminar in Glasgow on 4th May 2011, chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy and organised by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Scotland as part of their Inquiry into Human Trafficking in Scotland.