The New School for Social Research Launches the Zolberg Center on Global Migration
Aristide R Zolberg (1931–2013)
Building on its position as a leader in challenging contemporary thought on the most pressing global issues, The New School for Social Research launched the Zolberg Center on Global Migration yesterday. Under the co-direction of Alexandra DĂ©lano, assistant professor of Global Studies and Miriam Ticktin, associate professor of Anthropology, the Center will provide a space for research and scholarship, policy debate, and discussion with activists and artists around issues of global migration and mobility, their economic impact, political consequences and their meaning for issues of citizenship and identity.
In addition to hosting key speakers and panels and conducting interdisciplinary scholarly research, starting next fall the Center will also form and fund working groups and labs around areas of common interest related to global migration amongst faculty and students.
“The Zolberg Center will put The New School at the forefront of important scholarly, policy and cultural debates around migration,” said Will Milberg, dean of The New School for Social Research. “I look forward to the collaboration across academic disciplines, engaging new ideas, and inspiring scholarly debates the formation of this new center will surely bring about.”
Named for the late Ary Zolberg (1931–2013), professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research and pioneer in the fields of immigration politics, studies of ethnicity, and practices of integration, the Center will kick off with an emphasis in three areas: migration and mobility within the Global South; intersections of global migration and new forms of media and technology; and the transnational relationships between emigrants and their home countries.
Yesterday’s opening event featured an address by Kenneth Prewitt, the Carnegie Professor of Social Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, on “What is Your Race? And Why the State Wants to Know,” which discussed his forthcoming book on racial politics surrounding the United States. Coming up on April 10, the center will present Seyla Benhabib (Yale University) on “The Rights of Others and the Critique of Humanitarian Reason.” The final event of the semester will be a workshop on Memory and Migration, with a keynote on May 1, by Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz (University of Illinois) on “Citizens of Memory: Citizenship Between Holocaust Remembrance and Transnational Migration.”
Learn more by visiting the Zolberg Center’s website.