Call for Papers (Deadline February 8, 2013)
Asia-Pacific Worlds in Motion V: Migration Beyond Borders
May 30 and 31, St. John’s College, University of British Columbia
We invite graduate students and early-career scholars to participate in a conversation about migration beyond borders. Recent scholarship in the interdisciplinary area of migration studies has begun to critically examine the significance of the border as a construct that separates territorial formations. The border is not just a line on a map; it is an ever-shifting political idea negotiated and practised in myriad ways. In this era of global mobility it is no longer geographically specifiable, but is implicated in a vast array of spaces and power relations in which citizens and bodies are controlled and made. In the Asia-Pacific, where some territorial divisions appear to stretch the breadth of the ocean and others are sensed but not demarcated, the border simultaneously has real, lived dimensions and is increasingly insignificant. But in an age of security discourses and supra-national political-economic partnerships, human experiences created by borders are as salient as ever.
For this conference, we solicit papers that consider migrant experiences and the migration phenomenon both in relation to borders and beyond them. Our geographical focus is the greater Asia-Pacific, including intercontinental, transnational and regional dynamics, with an emphasis on relationships between Asia and the Americas. Themes include migration policy, human security, social justice, and the political dimensions of migration and migrant experiences. We are also interested in papers that deal explicitly with methodology in migration research.
In the interest of a wide-reaching conversation, we welcome papers on the following related topics:
– Migration, borders and boundaries
– Geopolitics of migration
– Temporary migration
– Forced migration
– Diasporic communities
– Migration policy and politics
– Social justice and migration
– Asian migration and migrant experiences
– Second generation and later generation migrants
– Migration and religion
– Family, children and youth migration
– Migrants in the city
– Other topics related to migration beyond borders in the Asia-Pacific
Asia-Pacific Worlds in Motion is an international interdisciplinary conference. The 2013 meeting will be held in St. John’s College at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver on May 30th and 31st, 2013. It will be the fifth in a series of meetings that are jointly organized by and alternately convened at UBC and the National University of Singapore (NUS). The conference website is under construction and can be found at http://kristofk.com/apwim.
Prospective participants are invited to submit an abstract of up to 300 words by February 8th, 2013 to Lachlan Barber and Kara Shin at apwim2013@gmail.com. Accommodation and meals for the duration of the conference will be provided for those travelling to Vancouver, but participants are responsible for covering all other travel costs.
For more information, please contact the conference organizers at apwim2013@gmail.com.
The conference is jointly presented by:
St John’s College, University of British Columbia
Metropolis B.C., University of British Columbia
Migration Cluster & Division of Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of
Arts and Sciences, National University of Singapore
Justin K.H. Tse 