Penn Calendar Penn A-Z School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania

GRADUATE WORKSHOP - (Dis)Integrating Migration

Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

College Hall, Room 209 (Accessibility)
Lunch provided.

Smita Ghosh (Penn History)
"Losing Control of Our Borders: Immigration Detention in the 1970s and 1980s" (PDF)

Osman Balkan (Penn Political Science)
"The Graves of Berlin" (PDF)


THIS MONTH'S PAPERS discuss the politics of migration and migrant communities.

Ghosh's paper describes the growth of immigration detention facilities in response to the migration of Caribbean refugees during the early 1980s. Immigration detention developed because of officials' growing interest in deterring immigration and because of the intimate links between immigration and criminal justice policy-making during the period.  What seemed like a reaction to unexpected global migration waves was representative of more forward-thinking policy initiatives.  As asylum-seekers arrived from Haiti and Cuba in the early 1980s, federal administrators developed a more professionalized, privatized and ultimately more permanent immigration detention regime.

Balkan's paper investigates representations of national identity and citizenship on the tombstones of immigrant graves in Germany. It highlights the central role that burial grounds play in the construction of diasporic memory and subjectivity through a comparative study of three Islamic cemeteries in Berlin.