Migrant Knowledge

Migrant Knowledge

Category: Features

West German experts emphasized cultural otherness as an impediment to the employment—and "emancipation"—of Turkish migrant women instead of attending to the women's testimony about the practical impediments they faced in a system built on the unpaid labor of housewives.

Knowledge about the ‘Migrant Woman’ as an Alibi for State Inaction in the Federal Republic of Germany

Mar 29, 2022
Lauren Stokes
 
Documents from the Qing dynasty's borderlands are crucial for understanding migrations in these regions, but accessing and contextualizing them is complicated by a unique set of political and archival challenges from the past and present.

The ‘Manchurian Archive’ and the Discourse on ‘Lost’ and ‘Returned’ Documents in China

Mar 12, 2022
Christina Philips
 
Categorization schemes are never neutral and rarely comprehensive, but the question of how to handle them is thornier than one might think. How can we question categories and their confining walls given that those same walls also provide shelter?

On the Discomfort of Shedding Ill-Fitting Categories

Mar 7, 2022
Ulrike Bialas
 
The author interrogates a mid-nineteenth-century map for German emigrants, using it as a way to talk about the central concept behind this blog, "migrant knowledge".

An 1853 Map for German-Speaking Emigrants

Jan 30, 2022
Mark R. Stoneman
 
Reflections on children's agency in historiography in the run-up to a workshop on the theme. The authors engage with Sarah Mazah's 2020 article in the American Historical Review.

Reflections on Children’s Agency (in Migration)

Jan 5, 2022
Bettina Hitzer
Friederike Kind-Kovács
 
The intimate and personal network of an imperial official's well-educated wife who migrated with her husband temporarily to the colonies served as a conduit for the sharing and formation of knowledge about Britain’s empire in the late eighteenth century.

Colonial Correspondence and Knowledge Production: Elizabeth Simcoe and her Personal Networks

Dec 27, 2021
Elyse Bell
 
What migrants relay about a host country to their country of origin is shaped by competing pressures that transform knowledge. The reports of two London-based correspondents to prerevolutionary Russia illustrate this point.

Between Fact and Fiction: The Fabrication of Migrant Knowledge in Professional and Personal Correspondence

Dec 16, 2021
Anna Vaninskaya
 
Visual and auditory metaphors shape the historiography of encounter, including research on translators in nineteenth-century Alaska.

Metaphors and the Historiography of Encounter

Nov 19, 2021
Luise Fast
 
Irawati Karve earned her doctorate in interwar Berlin before returning to India, where she pursued a career in anthropology. Discussing her work is difficult because she both rejected and adopted claims from the now infamous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.

The Contradictions of Irawati Karve: A Conversation

Nov 9, 2021
Thiago Pinto Barbosa
Urmilla Deshpande
 
During the interwar period and much of World War II, the Parisian café Le Bosphore served as a focal point of sociability and knowledge exchange for Sephardi Jews from the former Ottoman Empire.

Cafés as Sites of Migrant Knowledge Exchange: The Case of Ottoman Jews in Interwar Paris

Oct 21, 2021
Robin Buller
 
Trying to understand German migration to the United States in the nineteenth century raises the problem of how the U.S. migration regime shaped the data that researchers rely on in the first place.

Why the History of Knowledge Matters in a Digital History of Migration

Sep 19, 2021
Sebastian F. Bondzio
 
The authors discuss disparagement practices using the "invectivity" approach developed at the TU Dresden. Shaming helps demarcate in-groups from out-groups, feeding communication loops and producing emotions beyond the immediate parties involved.

Invective Loops: How Shaming Migrants Shapes Knowledge Orders

Aug 24, 2021
Dagmar Ellerbrock
Swen Steinberg
 
Using the example of Max Vasmer's biography, the authors argue that "Slavic Studies in general and in German-speaking countries in particular can and should be studied from the perspective of migrant knowledge."

Slavic Studies as Migrant Knowledge: The Case of Max Vasmer

Jul 22, 2021
Vladislava Maria Warditz
Wim Coudenys
 
Elliot Young reminds us to consider migrants not only as victims, as the objects of others' actions, but also as subjects with their own agency. This shift in perspective has implications for how we understand migration facilitation, among other things.

Beyond Chinese “Coolies” as Victims

Jul 14, 2021
Elliot Young
 
Child migrants often turned to their peers to obtain certain kinds of information. Finding their peers in other towns meant turning to the migration agencies, which generated and archived revealing sources.

Knowledge Sharing among British Child Migrants in Canada, 1869–1950

Jun 22, 2021
Susanne Quitmann
 
The author examines records from trade union seminars given by IG Metall to Yugoslav workers in West Germany. Initially, the classes reflected the union's needs, but xenophobia in the 1980s led immigrant workers to express their own concerns in these meetings.

Trade Union Knowledge and Educational Programs for Yugoslavian Workers in West Germany, 1970s–1980s

May 27, 2021
Matthias Thaden
 
In this two-part piece about Jewish refugee photographers, the authors "travel to another historical context to inquire about what migrants and refugees 'knew' and how they choose to communicate their knowledge in their photographic work."

Displacement in Stills: German-Jewish Photographers on the Move

May 14, 2021
Sheer Ganor
Rebekka Grossmann
 
Finding suitable teaching materials to prepare Jewish children and youth for their new lives in Palestine after having survived the Holocaust presented a unique set of challenges.

Some Challenges for Knowledge Transfer in Jewish Displaced Persons Camps after World War II

Apr 15, 2021
Matthias Springborn
 
Using oral history, the author explores how a Polish Jewish family "used knowledge as a strategy not merely to survive but to build a new life" in what turned out to be a highly contingent transit process.

Knowledge as a Strategy on the Migratory Routes of Polish Jewish Survivors after World War II

Mar 29, 2021
Anna Cichopek-Gajraj
 
Migration strategies and state regulative measures exist in a dialectical relationship. The author looks at state efforts to control emigration from the Habsburg monarchy and the efforts of migration facilitators to satisfy demand for passage to South America.

Where is the Migration Innovation? The Habsburg State vs. Facilitators of Migration

Mar 8, 2021
Ulf Brunnbauer
 
Victoria Harms talks with the Turkish-German activist and author Ali Can about race, diversity, and identity in contemporary Germany.

‘I am German plus something else’ — An Interview with Ali Can

Feb 18, 2021
 
Emil Trinkler didn't migrate as such, but Marjan Wardak's article speaks to central themes on this blog. People and knowledge itself are on the move, interacting with go-betweens and yielding something new.

The Scientist Emil Trinkler’s Exploration across South Asia, 1915–1933

Jan 29, 2021
Marjan Wardaki
 
The author looks at the relationship between two famous early sociological community studies, "Middletown" and "Marienthal." The latter became Paul Lazarsfeld's "ticket out of Europe just as the continent was descending into fascism."

Drifting Along: Unemployment and Interwar Social Research, from Marienthal to Muncie

Dec 28, 2020
Joseph Malherek
 
The author discusses the source value of U.S. immigrant newspapers. If there are many reasons to approach them with caution, they can still help scholars learn "what migrants knew and wanted their fellow migrants to know..."

Transatlantic Migrants and Knowledge in the U.S. Immigrant Press

Dec 22, 2020
Kristina E. Poznan
 
W. F. Whyte's 'Street Corner Society' became a popular text for sociology students, but specialists in Italian American studies never warmed to it. Donna Gabaccio explains why with "a hidden history of gender and ethnic dynamics" in the academy.

‘The Book That Would Not Die’

Nov 13, 2020
Donna R. Gabaccia
 
Annette Lützel explains the FRG's very different responses to the large numbers of refugees who came in the early 1990s and in 2015. Citing recent employment and job-training numbers, she sees an ongoing positive trend.

From Hoyerswerda to Welcome Culture: Asylum and Integration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany

Nov 5, 2020
Annette Lützel
 
"Migration" is not a stable, preexisting category but rather a product of societal processes that shape what the term comprises. We must take these entanglements with the past into account in our present-day research.

Not a Given Object: What Historians Can Learn from the Reflexive Turn in Migration Studies

Oct 27, 2020
Isabella Löhr
Christiane Reinecke
 
A Berlin-based group works with refugee girls, who make films as a way to narrate their life experiences. The idea is to help the girls form and mobilize knowledge repertoires for their self-empowerment, although the process is by no means linear.

Girls’ Self-Empowerment through Narrative in Film

Sep 23, 2020
Mervete Bobaj
Anh-Susann Pham Thi
 
A researcher from Scotland, by way of Germany, examines a key text offered to international scholars at UC Berkeley during their initial orientation session there.

Exclusion and Erasure in ‘The Values Majority Culture Americans Live By’

Sep 3, 2020
Sarah Earnshaw
 
A book for children about young refugees in New York was rooted in real experiences. Its author's eye for children's agency can help us to understand refugee children as go-betweens in wartime New York.

Young Refugees and Knowledge in New York during World War II: The Example of Babette Deutsch’s ‘The Welcome’

Aug 17, 2020
Swen Steinberg
 
The "Qur'an school problem" in West Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s was in many ways a product of the migrant experts who bemoaned it, the teachers on loan from Turkey.

Turkish Teachers, Migrant Knowledge, and ‘the Qurʾan School Problem’ in West Germany

Aug 14, 2020
Brian Van Wyck
 
Protestant missionary schools affected the construction of "indigenous knowledge" in complex ways, including through their role in the emergence of local go-betweens, who carried this knowledge into colonial contexts.

The Formation of Indigenous Knowledge in Protestant Mission Schools, 1900–1930

Aug 10, 2020
Elisabeth Engel
 
Glenn Penny highlights aspects of children's go-between role in Chile not visible in histories of European migration to the United States. German schools in Chile and teachers posted there from Germany are central to this multigenerational story.

Routes of Knowledge: Growing up German in Chile, 1900–50

Aug 7, 2020
H. Glenn Penny
 
The role of children in history matters, including in knowledge formation and in migration. Simone Lässig introduces a miniseries about children and youth as go-betweens in migration contexts, whether people migrated or knowledge itself.

Knowledge and the Agency of Children in Migration Contexts

Aug 5, 2020
Simone Lässig
 
How to name people who move their lives across borders willingly or under duress? Eliyana Adler discusses the diverse terms contemporaries used to identify the various groups of Polish Jews who survived World War II as refugees in the Soviet Union.

What’s in a Name? How Titles Construct and Convey Knowledge about Migrants

Jun 18, 2020
Eliyana R. Adler
 
Many European émigrés escaping the Nazis helped shape consumer capitalism in the United States. After the war, they did business in Europe as well, circulating their transformed knowledge to shape marketing there.

European Émigrés and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge: Examples from Mid-20th-Century Consumer Capitalism

Apr 29, 2020
Jan Logemann
 
Germans translated Buddhist texts in Germany, and they migrated to British Ceylon in order to get closer to Buddhism. Their Buddhist practices ended up changing Buddhism's relationship to texts in their South Asian home.

German Migrants and the Circulation of Buddhist Knowledge between Germany and British Ceylon

Apr 18, 2020
Sebastian Musch
 
Through playtime, Jewish refugee children in Shanghai acquired specific knowledge about their new home through sources unavailable to adults refugees.

The Power of Play: Jewish Refugee Children in World War II Shanghai

Mar 18, 2020
Kimberly Cheng
 
As Chinese children and youth immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they had to overcome increasing restrictions on their entry. Wendy Rouse describes the knowledge they formed and passed on to succeed.

Crossing Borders: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge

Mar 2, 2020
Wendy L. Rouse
 
Julie Weise asks how migrants responded to state-driven mandates to control and shape labor migration in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

In Sickness and in Health: Migrant Citizenships in the Postwar Years

Feb 7, 2020
Julie M. Weise
 
Andrea Wiegeshoff explorers the interactions of different ways of knowing at the moment of immigration using the 1914 example of Wong Kum Wo in Honolulu.

Clashing Ways of Knowing at the Moment of Immigration

Dec 16, 2019
Andrea Wiegeshoff
 
The work of both Hans Rosenberg and Raul Hilberg was initially marginalized, but later entered the mainstream of German historiography. Why? What role did migration play in their work and its reception?

Marginalized Migrant Knowledge: The Reception of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in West Germany after 1945

Nov 6, 2019
Anna Corsten
 
Hirschfeld's encounters with Islam and Muslims in Indonesia, India, and the Near East "taught him how closely connected the issues of sexual and cultural diversity were."

Knowledge in Transit: Global Encounters and Transformation in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Travelogue

Nov 6, 2019
Razak Khan
 
Makes a case for not prejudging people smugglers in history or the testimony they left behind in state police records, using the example of Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar period.

Background Knowledge: Interrogating Perceptions of Smugglers with Joseph Roth

Oct 30, 2019
Allison Schmidt
 
Revisits Werner Schiffauer's 1991 classic, Die Migranten aus Subay, which reminds us that "migrants have lives of their own before they arrive in host societies, and they never cease to maintain ties … to the homelands they leave behind."

Rebels against the Homeland: Turkish Guest Workers in 1980s West German Anthropology

Oct 23, 2019
Michelle Lynn Kahn
 
Surveys the research on current efforts to leverage professional knowledge and skills among migrant populations for development in their countries of origin. Pays particular attention to a program called Connecting Diaspora for Development.

Research on Diaspora Knowledge Transfer within a Temporary Return Program

Oct 16, 2019
Charlotte Mueller
 
Thinks about how migrant biographies and autobiographies can be used to understand associated knowledge transfer and translation processes, including their "success" or "failure." Examples are from Australia after World War Two.

Migrant Biographies as a Prism for Explaining Transnational Knowledge Transfers

Oct 7, 2019
Philipp Strobl
 
Explores two points in U.S. past when Jewish history and migration studies intersected: 19th-century studies of Jewish migration by local community organizations; and role played by Jewish social scientists in shaping modern migration studies.

Acquiring Knowledge About Migration: The Jewish Origins of Migration Studies

Sep 25, 2019
Tobias Brinkmann
 
"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."

Refuge and Refuse: Migrant Knowledge and Environmental Education in Germany

Sep 13, 2019
Joela Jacobs
 
The author reflects on the migrant knowledge revealed in Alex Pitstra's film about his complicated transnational family relationships, "Bezness as Usual."

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

Jul 15, 2019
Miriam Gutekunst
 
"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..."

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

Jun 17, 2019
Nicholas B. Miller
 
A young German in 19th-century North America bragged that his travels had enabled him to "learn and see how it goes in the world." What did he mean? What can we learn from him about migration, knowledge, and knowledge formation?

Migration, Creativity, and the Construction of Knowledge

Jun 3, 2019
Benjamin Hein
 
The author expected to find files in Paris for his study of Franco-Yiddishness in the interwar period, but they had wandered elsewhere. His surprise led him to consider "the migratory history of knowledge and knowledge-making."

Following the Archives: Migrating Documents and their Changing Meanings

Apr 18, 2019
Nick Underwood
 
Discusses a 1909 Syrian American advice book for Ottoman subjects planning to emigrate to the U.S., which contained knowledge about would-be immigrants' specific rights in the U.S. and self-fashioning tips for dealing with authorities there.

A Little Advice: Syrian American Advice Booklets as Knowledge Production

Mar 27, 2019
Stacy D. Fahrenthold
 
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.

Marginal Knowledge: The Transnational Practices of Latin American Mennonites

Mar 22, 2019
Ben Nobbs-Thiessen
 
The author argues that history must be reconceptualized to include migrants not as extras in a society's history but as constitutive of that society. Her example comes from contemporary Swiss history.

Telling History from a Migration Perspective is Not an Add-On

Mar 15, 2019
Francesca Falk
 
Points to manifold manifestations of migrant knowledge and reflects on how studying it can open fruitful avenues of historical research.

Migrant Knowledge: An Entangled Object of Research

Mar 14, 2019
Andrea Westermann

This piece was published on Migrant Knowledge (migrantknowledge.org). Any online images and printed with this file. / © German Historical Institute Washington, excepting third-party materials and without prejudice to the rights of individual authors.

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