Geert Lovink on Sun, 4 Mar 2007 21:02:23 +0100 (CET)


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[Nettime-nl] Shaking Up Citizenship (VU, 20 april 2007)


Please note the following event in your diaries, and pass this message
on to anyone who might be interested (appologies for any double
postings).

On Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21, 2007, the Legal and Social
Sciences faculties of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) will be
holding an international conference:

Shaking up Citizenship
Nation, State and Transnational Actors

(Academic directors:Prof. Oscar Salemink, Dr. Ton Salman, Dr. Sarah van
Walsum, Dr. Remco Nehmelman)

The conference will be held in Amsterdam. It will consist of two events.

First: a public talk to be given at 20:30 on Friday evening, April 20,
2007 by Saskia Sassen (author of The Global City, Globalisation and its
discontents, and Territory, Authority and Rights). This session will be
held in downtown Amsterdam (Singelkerk: Singel 452), and will be
organized in collaboration with the 'Globalisation Lectures' team, in
which Felix Meritis, De Volkskrant, Lemniscaat and VPRO are represented.
(see further: http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/dossiers/14337257/).


Second: an academic meeting to be held on Saturday April 21, 2007, at
the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. During this meeting, themes that will
have been addressed on the Friday evening will be discussed in more
detail, in the presence of Saskia Sassen:


-                  regulating migration and citizenship;

-                  identity politics;

- managing essential utilities, media and services in a transnational context.

Invited speakers for the Saturday session are: Professor Peter Spiro of
Temple University,  Professor Nicholas De Genova of Colombia University
and Dr. Martin Lodge of the London School of Economics. Other
participants will include prominent faculty members of the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam.

Registration.

There is no conference fee. However, for logistical reasons, a
registration deadline has been set at April 1st, 2007. If you wish to
register, please fill in the registration form, sent as an attachment
with this e-mail.

Why such a conference?

The conference organizers believe there is an urgent need to rethink the
concept of citizenship, and to closely examine changes that are
currently taking place in the relationship between nation, state and
transnational actors.


The world as it is traditionally presented, on a globe or in a school
atlas, closely resembles a patchwork quilt. It is made up of discrete,
neatly delineated entities called nations, each with its own colour,
shape and history. While one "patch" may be larger than another, or more
vividly coloured, we are shown no fundamental differences between these
nations. Each in theory is autonomous and sovereign and in that sense
equal to the others. And to a large degree, we are accustomed to think
of nations as discrete entities, each contained by its own borders and
enclosing its own population with its own "national character" and its
own political institutions designed to rule its own affairs.


Many of our daily experiences however do not stroke any longer with this
picture. Just taking into consideration the trappings of daily life -
food, clothes, water, energy, care, belief, entertainment - we have to
conclude that these are strongly interwoven with fields that lie far
beyond our "home patch". The same is true of the people we meet with
daily: friends, neighbours, colleagues - even our own families. There
will always be someone, somewhere, who is somehow bound to "somewhere
else". Most of us ourselves have crossed countless borders for work,
study or vacation.


So however rooted we may feel in our own "home patch", directly or
indirectly, we are connected in countless ways with people in other
places spread throughout the world. Looked at from this perspective, the
world shouldn't be pictured as the patchwork quilt that we know from our
school atlases, but as something totally different, more like the image
presented to us by airlines showing the flight routes of their fleet -
but then far more complex, including not just the flight routes of one
airline, but all the trade routes and lines of communication that
connect people to each other everywhere: a vast and complex network of
relationships, movements and interactions, held together by knots of
varying degrees of intensity, where greater or lesser numbers of
connecting lines converge.


The purpose of the conference is to encourage interdisciplinary and
international exchange of insights, knowledge and ideas among expert
academics, political actors and students, on the consequences of
globalization processes, in particular in the realm of the state's role
in a) protecting 'national interests', in b) protecting its national
citizens, in c) observing international treaties on human (including
migrating human's ) rights, and in d) fostering free international trade
and commerce - and in particular, on the intricacies of reconciling
these diverging obligations. At stake are the changing statures and
prerogatives of the states, and the status of both 'traditional' and
'wandering' citizens.


The purpose of the conference is to encourage interdisciplinary and
international exchange of insights, knowledge and ideas among expert
academics, political actors and students, on the consequences of
globalization processes, in particular in the realm of the state's role
in a) protecting 'national interests', in b) protecting its national
citizens, in c) observing international treaties on human (including
migrating human's ) rights, and in d) fostering free international trade
and commerce - and in particular, on the intricacies of reconciling
these diverging obligations. At stake are the changing statures and
prerogatives of the states, and the status of both 'traditional' and
'wandering' citizens.


Further information:

Please check the conference website for up-to-date information:
www.rechten.vu.nl/conferencecitizenship

*********************************************************************** *
*
Het werkgezelschap Migratie is een initiatief van het Centrum voor de
Geschiedenis van Migranten. Het werkgezelschap komt ongeveer elke drie
maanden bijeen. Het werkgezelschap is bedoeld voor netwerkvorming en de
uitwisseling van informatie over historisch migratieonderzoek. De
adreslijst van het gezelschap telt 100 namen.


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