- Fellowship: Binational Visiting Fellow Tandem Program in the History of Migration at GHI Pacific Regional Office in Berkeley. Application deadline: January 15, 2020.
- Reading: Andrea Westermann, "Migrations and Radical Environmental Change," NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin / NTM Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 27, no. 3 (September 2019): 377–389, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00048-019-00214-x. Anne Schult shares her thoughts about this piece in the JHI Blog's “Autumn Reading from our Editors.”
- Reading: Sarah Thomsen Vierra, "Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990," TRAFO: Blog for Transregional Research, March 15, 2019, in which she discusses her new book on the subject. You can also listen to her interview on New Books in Sociology.
- Reading: Martin Lutz, ed., "Migrants and Migration: Germans to North America in the 19th and 20th Centuries," special issue of Global Histories: A Student Journal 5 (February 2019)
- Conference panel: "The Go-Betweens: Youth, Migration, and Knowledge Transfer," AHA Session 163 / Central European History Society 8, New York City, January 5, 2020.
Marginalized Migrant Knowledge: The Reception of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in West Germany after 1945
Anna Corsten examines the reception of two German-speaking refugee historians in West Germany, Hans Rosenberg and Raul Hilberg. In both cases, their work was initially marginalized, but later it entered the mainstream of German historiography. Why? What role did migration play in their work and its reception? (1,922 words)
Knowledge in Transit: Global Encounters and Transformation in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Travelogue
Razak Khan looks at the role Islam and Muslims played for Hirschfeld in his 1933 travelogue, in which he described his encounters in Indonesia, India, and the Near East. According to Khan, "the tolerance and coexistence [Hirschfeld] encountered on his journey taught him how closely connected the issues of sexual and cultural diversity were." (2,400 words)
Background Knowledge: Interrogating Perceptions of Smugglers with Joseph Roth
Allison Schmidt makes a case for not prejudging people smugglers in history or the testimony they left behind in state police records. Drawing on the suggestive observations of Joseph Roth, her example centers on Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar period, after the breakup of empires had changed the legal status and economic situation of many people. (1,547 words)
Knowledge and Young Migrants
Now available at University of Chicago Press Journals: "Knowledge and Young Migrants," special issue of KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 3, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 191--351. Edited by Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg.
- "Why Young Migrants Matter in the History of Knowledge" by Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg
- "Child-Rearing as a Form of American Knowledge" by Paula S. Fass
- "What Debora's Letters Do: Producing Knowledge for the Basel Mission Family" by Simone Laqua-O'Donnell
- "Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion" by Wendy L. Rouse
- "African Youth on the Move in Postwar Greater France: Experiential Knowledge and Decolonial Politics at the End of the Empire" by Emily Marker
- "The Way to School between Two Worlds": Documenting the Knowledge of Second-Generation Immigrant Children in Switzerland, 1977–1983" by Kijan Espahangizi
- "Young People's Agency and the Production of Knowledge in Migration Processes: The Federal Republic of Germany after 1945" by Stephanie Zloch
Rebels against the Homeland: Turkish Guest Workers in 1980s West German Anthropology
Michelle Lynn Kahn revisits Werner Schiffauer's 1991 classic Die Migranten aus Subay (The Migrants from Subay) and reminds us of "a crucial reality: migrants have lives of their own before they arrive in host societies, and they never cease to maintain ties, whether physical or emotional, to the homelands they leave behind." (2,337 words)
Research on Diaspora Knowledge Transfer within a Temporary Return Program
Charlotte Mueller surveys the research on current efforts to leverage professional knowledge and skills among migrant populations for development in their countries of origin. She pays particular attention to a program called Connecting Diaspora for Development. (1,820 words)
Migrant Biographies as a Prism for Explaining Transnational Knowledge Transfers
Philipp Strobl thinks about how migrant biographies and autobiographies can be used to understand associated knowledge transfer processes, including their "success" or "failure." Keywords include "new biography," "actor centrism," and "translation," and the examples are from Australia after World War Two. (2,139 words)
Acquiring Knowledge About Migration: The Jewish Origins of Migration Studies
Tobias Brinkmann looks into how "studying Jewish migration" began "outside the academic sphere" in the 19th century. He also notes how a number of Jewish social scientists "[shaped] the conceptual foundations of migration studies in the United States during the middle decades of the twentieth century." (2,282 words)
Migrant Knowledge Notes 5
- Innovation through Migration: Senior Fellowships at the Pacific Regional Office of the GHI, UC Berkeley. Deadline: October 1, 2019.
- Visiting Fellowship to Lund, Sweden, 1–2 weeks. Next deadline: November 1, 2019.
- "Knowledge and Young Migrants," special issue of KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 3, no. 2 (Fall 2019), forthcoming.
Refuge and Refuse: Migrant Knowledge and Environmental Education in Germany
Joela Jacobs observes that “Migrant knowledge figures as a category of absence” in Europe. In Germany, one core issue is knowledge about recycling requirements and expectations. Efforts to teach it “betray an unreflective understanding of cultural identity”: knowing how to separate one’s trash serves as a marker of who belongs. (1,450 words)
Migrant Knowledge Notes 4
Upcoming Event: "Migrant Knowledge, Early Modern and Beyond: An Event at the Crossroads," University of Cambridge, September 15–17, 2019.
Call for Papers: "Environments of Exile: Refugees, Nature, and Representations: Biennial Conference of the North American Society for Exile Studies," September 18–20, 2020. Proposal deadline: September 30, 2019.
Exhibition: "The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement,", The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, June 22 – September 22, 2019.
Recent Events: Almost all of the conference reports in the Spring 2019 issue of the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC) relate to migration and knowledge.
Article: Sören Urbansky, "A Chinese Plague: Sinophobic Discourses in Vladivostok, San Francisco, and Singapore" in the same issue is not about migrant knowledge per se, but it has implications for past knowledge about three Chinese diasporic communities on the Pacific Rim.
Article: Uwe Lübken, "Histories of the Unprecedented: Climate Change, Environmental Transformations, and Displacement in the United States" by Uwe Lübken, Open Library of Humanities 5, no. 1, January 29, 2019, <http: //doi.org/10.16995/olh.347>.
Reference: Version 2.0 of Barbara Lüthi, "Migration and History," Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte July 6, 2018, includes a section on knowledge.