Migration Working Group-North West (MWG-NW) brings together academics, organisations and practitioners working on migration who are either based in the North West of the UK or researching migration in this region. In collaboration with I4P, the Migration Working Group – North West successfully hosted two seminars in the autumn semester.
19th October 2018 Inaugural Talk Prof Adrian Favell (University of Leeds), ‘From Political Economy to Political Demography: Beyond Methodological Nationalism’. In this seminar, Prof Adrian Favell talked about key issues in moving beyond conventional discussions of the political economy of international migration. He also explained the relevance of different paradigms such as the Marxist (i.e. global capitalist governance), Foucauldian (i.e., governmentality, biopower) and Liberal (i.e. institutionalist) in political economy. Furthermore, Prof Adrian Favell expressed how a more developed empirical agenda speaking to debates on global inequalities and development might be conceived.
15th November 2018 Dr Giovanna Fassetta (University of Glasgow) ‘Online Arabic from Palestine and Linguistic Hospitality’. Dr Giovanna Fassetta discussed the process of online collaboration to design an Online Arabic language course. The project was funded by the AHRC under their GCRF scheme and resulted in the Online Arabic from Palestine language course. The international and multilingual project was based in the School of Education, University of Glasgow (UK) and in the Gaza Strip (Palestine). Furthermore, she also presented about her new project that aims to link the Online Arabic from Palestine course and the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy for 2018-2020, which has recently been launched by the Scottish Government. The new project will discuss how ‘linguistic hospitality’ can be a way to welcome refugees and thus effectively facilitate integration as a two-way process.
The next MWG-NW event, sponsored by I4P, will be on 7th February 2019:
‘Language, Citizenship and Postcolonial Languaging’ with Prof Anne-Marie Fortier (Lancaster University). The talk will focus on language requirements for immigrant seeking permanent residency or citizenship, and how race and language are deeply connected through the entanglement of regimes of seeing with regimes of hearing.
Zana Vathi is Director of the MWG-NW and Reader in Social Sciences here at Edge Hill University.