BENJAMIN HEIN reflects on the nature of knowledge and knowledge formation in connection with a German migrant to North America in the mid-nineteenth century. What did it mean that this man, Christian Bönsel, could brag that he had been able to "learn and see how it goes in the world"? (1,455 words)
- Call: Workshop, Migration and Racism (deadline June 15, 2019)
- Program: Conference, In Global Transit (May 20–2, 2019)
- Crowdsourced Project: German-American Letters
NICK UNDERWOOD reflects on how files he had expected to find in Paris for his study of Franco-Yiddishness during the interwar period had, in fact, migrated elsewhere. He uses his surprise to discuss the part played by rescued or stolen documents in "the migratory history of knowledge and knowledge-making." (2,015 words)
- Summer school, University of Bern (due April 30)
- Research grant for Immigration History Research Center Archives (due June 1)
- Conference, London School of Economics (due June 30)
STACY D. FAHRENTHOLD discusses the significance of a 1909 Syrian American advice book for Ottoman subjects planning to emigrate to the United States. The Arabic-language text included knowledge about the would-be immigrants' specific rights in America and the important self-fashioning necessary for dealing with U.S. authorities. (1,578 words)
BEN NOBBS-THIESSEN examines the personal geographies of some Mennonites in Latin America who "have exercised a paradoxical degree of mobility" despite their well-known horse-and-buggy appearance. (2,117 words)
- Deadline: March 31, 2019, for Material Cultures in Migration, University of Birmingham, June 21, 2019.
- Deadline: April 20, 2019, for Imagining Migration, Knowing Migration: Intermedial Perspectives, Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg, March 19–21, 2020.
FRANCESCA FALK argues that history must be reconceptualized to include migrants not as extras in a society's history but as constitutive of that society. (2,567 words)
ANDREA WESTERMANN points to manifold manifestations of migrant knowledge and reflects on how studying it can open fruitful avenues of historical research. (1,531 words)
CHARLOTTE MUELLER points out that "migrants can be knowledge senders and knowledge receivers simultaneously, in their country of destination as well as in their country of origin." Knowledge transfer and human migration can both be "circular."
☍ OUTSIDE LINK
MARK STONEMAN abstracts six posts about migration and knowledge published at History of Knowledge in the past two years. (336 words)
READING TIP: Simone Lässig, “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 59 (Fall 2016): 29–59.
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