Whose Knowledge? Knowledge about Migrants vs. Migrants’ Knowledge

The German Historical Institute Washington DC (GHI) established its Pacific  Office at UC Berkeley in 2017. The GHI is an internationally recognized center for advanced study. It serves as a transatlantic bridge connecting American and European scholars and seeks to make their research accessible to decision-makers in the public and private sectors as well as to a general audience. While the Institute is particularly dedicated to fostering the study of German history in North America and of American history in Germany, its research and scholarly activities range beyond German and American history to encompass comparative, international, and global history. The research at the  GHI in Berkeley focusses on history of knowledge and migration as well as transcoceanic history.

GHI Washington, Pacific Office at UC Berkeley

Shalini Randeria, president and rector of the Central European University (Vienna) will deliver the fifth Annual Bucerius Lecture.

David Brower Center

Professor Randeria’s reflections on migration — a pervasive, unwanted, yet enduring process — interrogate the complicity of mainstream European academic scholarship on the phenomenon with the attempts of the modern states to establish monopolies of truth by shaping the narratives and even the vocabulary in this fraught field of enquiry. By placing the question of the migrant’s ‘undesirability’ by definition at the center of so-called liberal border policies, Professor Randeria highlights the dynamics of deeply entrenched post-colonial asymmetries of power and privilege that manifest themselves in classifying some people as being “out of place.” The migrants are thus marked not by their mobility but by a position of political and legal precarity, rightlessness and exclusion. Moreover, the current European framing of migration as a problem of radical cultural alterity pits the liberal European citizen against an illiberal non-European migrant, whose very presence poses a threat to European “host” societies and cultures. Liberal values thus function as a new register of Othering that redirects our attention to exclusionary practices in strengthening the citizen/migrant divide.Shalini Randeria has had a distinguished academic career as a sociologist/social anthropologist at institutions of higher education across Europe. In 2021, Shalini Randeria was the first woman, and the first person from the Global South, to be elected as president and rector of the CEU since the founding of the university 30 years ago. Before that, she was rector of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, where she directed the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. She holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on “soft authoritarianisms”. Professor Randeria has published widely on the anthropology of globalization, law, the state, and social movements with a regional focus on India. Her podcast series, Democracy in Question, goes into its fourth season in spring 2022.The lecture is part of an annual program that also includes a workshop for emerging scholars from Germany and the Northern America who present and discuss their research in “Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives”. The Young Scholar Forum and the lecture are funded by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, one of the major German private foundations active in the field of migration and transformation studies.To ensure the safety of our speaker, staff, and audience, masks will be required during the lecture.This event will also be live streamed on Zoom. Please select the ticket option "attend online" to receive the Zoom link.

Whose Knowledge? Knowledge about Migrants vs. Migrants’ Knowledge

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