Strategizing the Future of Migration Studies: Conceptual Gambits from the Cambridge History of Global Migrations Vol II (CHGM)

This is a hybrid seminar.

Register on Zoom: https://ntu-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZckc-uvrj4uEtZiIN-EWGmchxgLH4f2_SZm

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Viewed through a “mobility lens,” migration is a pervasive and necessary activity throughout human history, intrinsic to many aspects of social and economic systems.  After 1800, the period covered in CHGM Vol. II, levels of migrations peaked, fueled by imperially impelled globalization, even as the emergence of nation-states as the normative political units imposed unprecedented levels of regulation, categorization, and illegalization of many types of migrants.  The expansive comparative and relational coverage of these transformations presented in CHGM enables identification of major patterns and practices of migration and regulation while providing opportunity to theorize more normative and less politically fraught approaches to researching migrants and migration. This lecture will summarize major findings from the 32 chapters contributed by an international assemblage of scholars featuring the conceptual gambits that they propose to advance the future of migration studies.   

Madeline Y. Hsu is professor of history and Asian American Studies at UT Austin.  Her books include Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000); The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015); and Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Her monographs have received awards from the Association for Asian American Studies, the Society of Historians for American Foreign Relations, and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.  She co-edited the anthology with Maddalena Marinari and Maria Cristina Garcia, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 (UIP 2019).  She is one of five co-editors for the 2-volume, Cambridge History of Global Migrations, which is forthcoming June 2023.