NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY - Seminar Series on 'Diasporas, Media and Politics of Identity' and 'Everyday Cultures' 2007-08

 

The Institute of Cultural Analysis & the Communication, Culture and Media Studies team invite you to our next seminar: 

 

'Glocal' Strategies of Place-Making and the Meaning of Citizenship

 

Guest speaker: Dr Maja Korac, School of Social Sciences, Media, and Cultural 

   Studies, at the University of East London

Wednesday, 28  November  4:00-5:30 pm 
Room: George Eliot 219 (Clifton Campus)

 

Abstract

 

The paper examines how refugees, understood as social actors, are making and remaking their lives in new socio-cultural environments. Analysis is embedded in the understanding that a sense of place is developed through various forms of social relations occurring and tied through the interaction of structure and agency. Discussion is empirically grounded in findings of my ethnographic research conducted among refugees from the successor states of Yugoslavia in Rome and Amsterdam. The paper explores lived-in-world of refugees by focusing on different types of connection, emerging forms of interaction, and networks of social relations through which they forge a place for themselves in the new society, create meaning and form attachments. While bonding and bridging social connections they form in receiving societies are embedded in local settings and strategies, the process of creating 'home' away from 'home' also engenders transnational and/or global social connection. Refugees are increasingly living in a 'glocalized' social reality characterised by interrelation between local and global structures in which they struggle to 'nest' themselves. The paper focuses specifically on forms and processes of transnational home-making through which refugees link and combine their new as well as former 'homes' as one social field and experience. It considers their consequences for conventional understandings of citizenship

 

Dr Maja Korac is Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies, at the University of East London. Her teaching, research, and publications are in the areas of gender, ethnicity, nationalism, conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as forced migration, focusing particularly on refugees and internally displaced people in zones of conflict as well as in receiving societies. Her latest publications include 'Linking Arms: Women and war in post-Yugoslav states' (1998); (co-edited) 'Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War Zones' (2003) and forthcoming 'Home, belonging and Exile: Being a Refugee in Rome and Amsterdam'. Oxford: Berghahn. She is co-founder of the Women in Conflict Zones Network (WICZNET) and co-coordinator of the project: "A Comparative Study of the Issues Faced by Women as a Result of Armed Conflict: Sri Lanka and the Post-Yugoslav States" at York University (1998-2000). Her most recent research, funded by the EU Action Program to Combat Social Exclusion, examined exclusionary mechanisms confronting refugees and asylum seekers in disadvantaged urban areas in transition. 

 

Further information please contact Olga Guedes Bailey [log in to unmask]

 


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