Seminar

Who is  'the migrant' and why does it matter? White Capital and the Contemporary Race-Migration Nexus [CANCELED]

Catrin Lundström (Linköping University)

March 31, 2020, 16h00 (CANCELLED)

Room 1, CES | Alta

Framework

‘The migrant’ tends to be imagined as a non-privileged, non-white, non-western subject in search of a better future in Europe or the US, and, as such, constructed as a pre-constituted subject shaped by notions of marginalization and poverty. What kinds of stories are obscured by this recurrent image of ‘the migrant’ and how do such categorizations hamper the analysis of race, privilege and belonging within studies of migration? Why are some individuals not regarded as migrants despite their obvious migrant status? Why are other individuals seen as migrants and thus denied their national belonging in spite of their formal status as national citizens? This presentation develops critical reflections around the conceptualization of ‘the migrant’ with particular attention to (a) autochthony and belonging, (b) race and citizenship and (c) white capital.


Nota biográfica

Catrin Lundström is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), at Linköping University in Sweden. Her research addresses intersections of privilege and inequality in relation to migration, nationality and citizenship, with empirical studies covering the US, Singapore, Spain and Sweden. She is the author of the book White Migrations: Gender, Whiteness and Privilege in Transnational Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and a range of international articles on transnational migration, critical race and whiteness studies, urban ethnography, qualitative research methods and feminist sociology, and regularly analyses these topics in Nordic media and public debates. Lundström holds a PhD in Sociology from Uppsala University in Sweden, with a thesis on young Latinas and the racialized boundaries of Swedishness. She has previously been a visiting researcher at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the University of California, Santa Barbara in the US.