Giving History its Place in Migration and Refugee Debates and Research

Workshop organized by Jan Willem Duyvendak (Paris IAS fellow) and Christophe Bertossi (IFRI).

Presentation

In the current debates concerning refugees, we observe, in some European countries, at least three ways in which history tends to 'disappear':
(1) the past is either absent because it is unknown (it thus looks as if we have never dealt with refugees before...)
(2) actual developments are put in a quasi-historical perspective, by claiming that certain countries have always known certain types of policies, resulting in a rather static and a-historical picture as well;
(3) migrants are urged to leave their histories home.

This seminar will look into ways to do 'justice' to history, both in the political debate and in scholarly work.

Program

Thursday 23rd

9:30         Arriving, coffee and welcome

10:00        Jan Willem Duyvendak (Amsterdam / Paris IEA)
                 Remembering migration past in Amsterdam and the Netherlands
10:25        Discussant: Paolo Boccagni
10:40        General discussion

11:00        Christophe Bertossi (Paris)
                 History and moral boundaries in contemporary debates about French
                 citizenship
11:25        Discussant: Catherine Perron
11:40        General discussion

12:00        Coffee break

12:15        Nancy Foner (New York)
                 The US as a classic immigration country: the uses and abuses of history
12:40        Discussant: Tibor Dessewffy
12:55        General discussion

13:15        Lunch break

14:30        Paolo Boccagni (Trento)
                 Giving migrants' biographical history its place - through home studies. A
                 case-study from Italy
14:55        Discussant: Paul Mepschen
15:10        General discussion

15:30        Yannick Coenders (Amsterdam)
                 Disconnecting uncomfortable pasts: explaining the blackness of blackface
                 in the Dutch Sinterklaas tradition
15:55        Discussant: Olivier Esteves
16:10        General discussion

16:30        Coffee break

16:45        Tibor Dessewffy (Budapest)
                 Dreaming homogeneous – the alternate currents of history in Hungarian
                 public discourse
17:10        Discussant: Christophe Bertossi
17:25        General discussion

17:45        Concluding the first day

Friday 24th

9:30         Oliver Esteves (Lille) 
                The centrality of the American ghetto motif in British race relations debates:
                a confusing continuum
9:55         Discussant: Yannick Coenders
10:10        General discussion

10:30        Paul Mepschen (Leiden)
                 The genesis of Dutch autochthony. Displacement, nostalgia and
                 respectability
10:55        Discussant: Nancy Foner
11:10        General discussion

11:30        Coffee break

11:45        Catherine Perron (Paris)
                 Baden-Württemberg, ein Einwanderungsland ? Uses and absuses of the
                 history of emigration and immigration to South-West Germany
12:10        Discussant: Jan Willem Duyvendak
12:25        General discussion

12:45        Concluding discussion

13:15        Lunch break

14:30        Lecture by Nancy Foner:
                 "The Not So Good Old Days: How the US Became a Multicultural Society”