Please note, the time and venue for the workshop have changed. It will now take place from 13.00 to 15.00 in room B600 at the Department of Social Anthropology.
This research workshop will discuss the result of our ongoing research project The Indian Underbelly: Marginalization, Migration and State Intervention in the Periphery, funded by RJ.
The idea is to place the migrants’ experiences that we have recorded when young migrants from the hills of Northeast India move to work and study in metropolitan India with similar migrant trajectories in neighboring countries of Southeast Asia and South Asia; Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma and Bangladesh. The type of migration we have found cannot be captured by the existing literature on transnational migration that stresses border-crossings, that is, the often traumatic experience of crossing borders, neither that of the much discussed literature of seasonal or cyclical migration in larger countries like India and Indonesia. It is by bringing these various forms of Asian indigenous migrations in dialogue with our research findings that we hope to develop a more rigorous theoretical framework.
For this one-day workshop we have invited three well-known scholars:
- Professor Willem van Schendel, Amsterdam University
- Associate Professor Alpa Shah, London School of Economics
- Professor Filippo Osella, Sussex University
The direct outcome of the workshop is the edited volume that we are working on entitled Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration from the Resource Frontier to the Urban Sprawl in India. The Introduction and two chapters (case study by Dolly Kikon and Bengt G. Karlsson) will be circulated and discussed during the workshop.
Beside the mentioned invited scholars we will also invite colleagues at Stockholm University that are working with South Asia and Southeast Asian migrations.
The workshop is open to anyone interested to participate. For further information, please contact Bengt G. Karlsson or Dolly Kikon.
