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.

The Trade-Off Called Love? Knowledge about Love, Migration, and Borders

Miriam Gutekunst reflects on the migrant knowledge revealed in Alex Pitstra's film about his complicated transnational family relationships, Bezness as Usual. (1,736 words)

Of Dodos, Cane, and Migrants: Networking Migrant Knowledge between Mauritius and Hawai’i in the 1860s

Nicholas B. Miller argues, "Reconstituting the networks of the complex and mobile individuals through which indenture globally spread as a legal form of labor can sharpen our understanding of how migration practices and policies became universalized over the course of the nineteenth century, extending well beyond the framework of individual empires." (1,745 words)

Migration, Creativity, and the Construction of Knowledge

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)

Migrant Knowledge Notes 3

Call: Migration and Racism in the United States and Germany in the Twentieth Century

Workshop, April 23–24, 2020, German Historical Institute Washington (GHI), Washington, DC
CFP Deadline: June 15, 2019

Program: In Global Transit: Forced Migration of Jews and other Refugees (1940s–1960s)

May 20–22, 2019, Pacific Regional Office of GHI Washington and the MAGNES Collection of Jewish Art and Life, both at the University of California, Berkeley

Crowdsourced Project: German Heritage in Letters

Digital project to find and share historic German-American correspondence
Managed by GHI Washington

Following the Archives: Migrating Documents and their Changing Meanings

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)

Migrant Knowledge Notes 2

Call for Summer School Applications: Challenging the Sites of Knowledge: Medial and Pluri-Medial Configurations and Transformations

September 3–7, 2019, Graduate School of the Humanities, Universität Bern
Deadline: April 30, 2019

Grant in Aid Awards for Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) at the University of Minnesota

Deadline: June 1, 2019

Call for Papers: Extraction, Expropriation, Erasure? Knowledge Production in International Relations. Millenium: Journal of International Studies

October 19–20, 2019, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Deadline: June 30, 2019