Fifth Annual Bucerius Young Scholars Forum at the Pacific Regional Office of the GHI in Berkeley, ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius (Web)

Time: 18.-21.10.2021
Venue: Berkeley
Proposals by: 15.02.2021

Conveners: Franziska Exeler (FU Berlin and Univ. of Cambridge) and Sören Urbansky (German Historical Inst. Washington, Berkeley).

The Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC invites proposals for papers to be presented at the fifth Bucerius Young Scholars Forum. The organizers seek proposals from post-doctoral scholars, recent PhDs, as well as those in the final stages of their dissertations with a background in history and/or related fields.

The Bucerius Young Scholars Forum is funded by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. It is an annual program designed to bring together a transatlantic group of ten scholars based in Germany, Europe, North America, and beyond to explore new research in the history of migration. The forum is connected to the 2021 Annual Bucerius Lecture on “Knowing Refugees: Historical Perspectives,” which will be delivered by historian Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester) on October 18, 2021.

The organizers call for empirically rich and theoretically informed contributions in migration studies that interrogate questions of knowledge production, the creation of borders, and the everyday lives of people in borderlands.

Borderlands are realms of ambiguity, from opposition between center and periphery to relations between empires and/or nation states, and between majorities and minorities. Borderlands are also places of political, economic, social, and cultural entanglements, with ever changing dynamics of migration, communication, and circulation. Historically, states have introduced various forms of control in order to overcome such ambivalence at their peripheries. State officials have continuously sought to categorize, racialize, or legalize migrants– processes with knowledge at their core. The formation of associated knowledge regimes helped state actors to classify different groups of people, shape immigration policies, and channel their movement. Read more … (Web).