Resumo

Questions of citizenship and belonging are usually organised within national frames and in this talk I ask how taking seriously the broader histories of empire and colonialism would enable us to rethink these central concepts. Such questions have become particularly acute in the context of a renewed atavism in Europe sparked in part by the recent attention given to the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders as well as the fiscal crisis and related continent-wide politics of austerity. While public intellectuals, such as Jurgen Habermas, have expressed concern about the growing economic inequality within and across European states, they have said little about the refugee crisis or the increasing hostility towards migrants and those presented as ‘multicultural others’ across Europe. This silence, as I will suggest, is not an individual lapse, but is systematically produced in the failure to think through the connected histories and connected sociologies of empire and colonialism at the heart of Europe and European conceptions of citizenship.
 

Bio

Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick and Guest Professor of Sociology and History at Concurrences Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden, Gurminder K. Bhambra is Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in Social Sciences at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, between November 7 and 11 2016. For the academic year, 2014-15, she was Visiting Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Princeton University and Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She has held Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at the University of Sussex funded by the ESRC and the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex and has also been a Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Centre at Mount Holyoke College, USA, where she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Critical Social Thought.