Call for Papers

Migrants, Identity and the City

One Day Conference

Regent’s American College London,

Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London NW1 4NS

Friday, 24 September 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

This conference, to be held at Regent's College, London, seeks to investigate the construction of power relations within the urban context through both theory and practice. We invite papers and posters exploring themes that fall within the following three streams: Identity and the City; Inequalities in Urban Areas; and Experiencing the City. The conference is open to everyone, and specifically aims to encourage participation by early career academics, as well as postgraduate students.

Abstracts should be approximately 400 words, and should be e-mailed to HebingM@regents.ac.uk and RoitmanK@regents.ac.uk by July 6^th, 2010. Abstracts should include the institutional affiliation of proponents, highlight which stream(s) their work falls into, and indicate whether the participant is proposing a presentation (app. 30 mins.) or a poster (during lunch and tea/coffee breaks). Please indicate also if you would be willing to chair a session.

The Conference

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to combine academic and policy work in the area of ‘migrants, identity and the city’. The morning will be dedicated to academic presentations, followed by lunch, where there is the opportunity for poster presentations. The afternoon will invite speakers from local community organisations, the voluntary sector, and the policy making arena, to encourage a debate between academic knowledge and policy and practice. The topics we would like to address are organised into three streams as follows:

1. Identity and the city – power of ideas

This stream will investigate the social construction of the notion of the city; it will explore for whose benefit cities are built, especially how the construction of the city creates opportunities for some communities, whilst it makes others invisible. Furthermore, this stream will also explore how migrants’ identities are shaped and re-shaped by the city as a context. This stream includes:

• Intellectuals and the construction of the city
• Who builds the identity of the city
• Media representations of the city/migrants

2. Engaging with inequalities in urban areas

The focus of this stream is on how inequalities are embedded in and reproduced through institutional structures in the city. How are particular inequalities created and maintained? How does social and economic policy address inequality, and how successful is it in doing so? This stream includes:

• Minorities and discrimination
• Employment
• Education
• Environment
• Legal structure

3. Different experiences of the city

This stream seeks to engage with how migrants experience the city, in contrast to other populations in the same urban space. By dissecting these different experiences, we hope to learn about the diverse networks of power built and experienced by different actors, and explore how these affect migrants’ experiences.

• Experiences and view of dominant sectors
• Experiences and views of the working classes
• Experiences and views of refugees/immigrants