We’re told by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that more people are currently in motion across the planet than even during the previous peak in the wake of the Second World War.
Legal Scholar Dr. Kathryn Abrams, University of California, Berkeley and Migration and Racism Expert and Independent Scholar Dr. Mark Terkessidis, Berlin, Germany, addressed such questions as: Who is moving and why? From where? To where? Should we be differentiating among people on the move? Is there a human right to move? To move when your home is a war zone? An ecological disaster zone? An economic disaster zone? Can places to which migrants want to move accommodate them? Why are so many political parties on the right in receiving nations using migration issues to motivate voters? How do terms and narratives used for would be migrants affect what receiving populations think about them? Are “dangers” real or made up with regard to cultures being changed by incoming groups who don’t speak the currently dominant language or practice currently dominant religions? What roles have so-called “race” and the realities of multicultural societies played in the history of migration and play today?
Our experts also reported on the creativity and agency of migrants themselves in defending their rights and achieving their goals of new and safer lives for themselves and their children, as well as offer examples of contexts, initiatives and programs through which some receiving countries have made a start toward supporting or integrating migrants. Moderated by Professor Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College.
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In Partnership with the Walter de Gruyter Foundation.
Biographies
Dr. Kathryn Abrams teaches feminist jurisprudence, voting rights and constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship has explored questions of employment discrimination, minority vote dilution, campaign finance, constitutional law, and law and the emotions, but it has focused most centrally on feminist jurisprudence. Within this area, Abrams has written on feminist methodology and epistemology, the jurisprudence of sexual harassment, and cultural and theoretical constructions of women’s agency. Before entering academia, Kathy Abrams clerked for Judge Frank M. Johnson of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has taught at the law schools at Boston University, Indiana University-Bloomington, Harvard University and Northwestern University. Most recently, she was Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Cornell University. While at Cornell, she served as Director of the Women’s Studies Program, and won several awards for teaching and for service to women. Abrams’ recent publications include “Fighting Fire with Fire: Rethinking the Role of Disgust in Hate Crimes” in the California Law Review (2002), “Subordination and Agency in Sexual Harassment Law” in Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (2003), “Extraordinary Measures: Protesting Rule of Law Violations after Bush v. Gore” in Law & Philosophy (2002), and “The Legal Subject in Exile” in the Duke Law Journal (2001).
Dr. Mark Terkessidis is a German journalist, author and migration researcher. His main topics are youth and pop culture, migration and racism. Terkessidis studied psychology in Cologne and was editor of the magazine Spex from 1992 to 1994. He taught at the universities of and St. Gallen and was a fellow at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. In 1996, Terkessidis was co-editor of the book Mainstream der Minorities, which was groundbreaking for the German-language discussion about pop culture and, in 2000, he was co-founder of the Institute for Studies in Visual Culture (ISVC) in Cologne . In 1998 he developed the term “racist knowledge,” which describes racism, not as a prejudice but, as part of a social value system.
Terkessidis received his doctorite at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz on the subject of knowledge about racism in the second generation of migrants. The work is entitled The Banality of Racism. Second-generation migrants develop a new perspective, published in 2004. Here, Terkessidis describes the effects of racism on those affected. He has also written for texts on art, the taz, the Tagesspiegel the Zeit, the Jungle World and literatures as well as for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Deutschlandfunk worked.
Irene Kacandes was educated at Harvard University, Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) and the Freie Universität (Berlin). Kacandes holds the Dartmouth Professorship #2 at Dartmouth College, where she teaches in the fields of German Studies, Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jewish Studies. Author or editor of nine books, her most recent publications include Let’s Talk About Death (Prometheus, 2015) and Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn, 2017). Her reflection on her paternal family’s fate in Occupied Greece, Daddy’s War (Nebraska, 2009, 2012), proposed a new genre, the paramemoir, for the study of personal material. Just released is the edited volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter 2022). Kacandes has held a number of top positions in international professional organizations, including the presidency of the German Studies Association and of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She also runs a book series on “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter, Germany.
This event is part of a series called “Humanities for Humans”, presented in partnership with the Walter de Gruyter Foundation (Berlin). Across eight sessions — four in-person and four virtual — the series brings people together to help generate a better understanding of what the humanities are and what role they can play in today’s complex world.