Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Universität Wien (Web)
Time: 24.02.2021, 18.00 Uhr (MEZ)
Venue: virtual space, via Vienna (Link)
Bookdescription: „On Many Routes is about the history of human migration. With a focus on the Habsburg Empire, this innovative work presents an integrated and creative study of spatial mobilities: from short to long term, and intranational and inter-European to transatlantic. Migration was not just relegated to city folk, but likewise was the reality for rural dwellers, and we gain a better understanding of how sending and receiving states and shipping companies worked together to regulate migration and shape populations.
Bringing historical census data, governmental statistics, and ship manifests into conversation with centuries-old migration patterns of servants, agricultural workers, seasonal laborers, peddlers, and artisans—both male and female—this research argues that Central Europeans have long been mobile, that this mobility has been driven by diverse motivations, and that post-1850 transatlantic migration was an obvious extension of earlier spatial mobility patterns. Demonstrating the complexity of human mobility via an exploration of the links between overseas, continental, and internal migrations, On Many Routes shows that migrations to the United States, to the nearest coalfield, and to the urban capitals are embedded within complicated patterns of movement.
There is no good reason to study internal apart from transnational moves, and combining these fields brings ample possibility to make migration research more relevant for the much broader field of social and economic history. This work poses an invaluable resource to the understudied area of Habsburg Empire migration studies, which it relocates within its wider European context and provides a major methodological contribution to the history of human migration more broadly. The ubiquity and functionality of human movement sheds light on the relationship between human nature and society, and challenges simplistic notions of human mobility then and now.“
Annemarie Steidl: On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire (Central European Studies) Purdue University Press 2020 (Link)
Annemarie Steidl is Associate Professor in the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna (Austria) and currently Continue reading →

The ScienceCampus Research Module Practices of Belonging (Verheimatlichung), and the Dep. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor: Ulf Brunnbauer, Volker Depkat, and Sabine Koller
Time: 28.-29.01.2021
Venue: virtual space, via Regensburg (Zoom-Link)

• Speakers: Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Vida Bakondy et.al

How do media shape the ways in which migrants can represent the experiences of their migration? What are the communicative possibilities of a given medium? What are its pressures, what are its limits when it comes to representing departures, journeys, arrivals and searches for belonging in the country of destination? Do these experiences exist prior to and independent of their medialization, or are they always the result of the meaning-making activities enabled, structured and shaped by the communicative pragmatics of the media in which they take place? If the latter is the case, can we establish a connection between the medial possibilities and limitations of the genre used for the representation of migration experiences, and how the migrants represent them? Is liminality not only inherent to the experience of many a migrant itself but also inherent to the media they use to articulate it?
In 19th-century emigrant letters, for example, a strong sense of the writers’ frustration with the limits of the letter as a medium for communicating migration experiences surfaces time and again. Today, Whatsapp messages and cell phone videos promise a greater range of communicative options to represent migrant experiences in their ambivalent complexity and to re-create communality with people left behind. Yet, also these media have their limits and are unable to communicate migration experiences in their fullness. There is always something that cannot be communicated, a rest left unsaid, and we hypothesize that the shortcomings of the media used to represent migration experiences constitute an integral part of migrant liminality.
This workshop is conceived as a space of intensive exchange and joint discussion, based on the close reading of textual and visual (self-)representations of migration experiences ranging from departure, border crossings, transit to arrival and new searches for belonging. The workshop will address three different media of self-representation: letters and life-writing, fictional writing, and visual testimonies. The speakers will embrace a Continue reading →