Workshop: “Migration and Memory in Postwar and Contemporary Europe”

Registration Link   This cross-disciplinary one-day workshop brings together six invited scholars and experts (alongside the three organizers) to examine the interlinkages of migration policies and European discourses over historical memory. We interrogate how competing historical narratives (of World War II-era genocide and expulsion, postwar labor migrations, Communism, decolonization, and/or EU expansion) shaped elite and popular attitudes toward migration policy in Europe. How do current anxieties surrounding migration to Europe mirror or depart from cycles of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee backlash since 1945? Crucially, how do recent immigrants to Europe engage with, adapt, and resist dominant historical narratives in their countries of residence? The workshop will feature scholarship that links migration controversies in Europe with colonial legacies and with the study of race, gender, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary focus.  

Workshop Schedule:

Opening Remarks (9:00)

Panel 1 (9:15-10:45): Regulating Migration and Asylum

Moderator: Mai See Thao Phi Hong Su and Lea Obermüller, “Remaking Fortress Europe: Mechanisms of Inclusion and Exclusion toward Vietnamese, Afghan, and Ukrainian Migrants” Christopher Molnar, “Holocaust Memory and Pro-Migrant Activism in Germany, c. 1978-1993” Liina-Ly Roos, “Narratives of Migration, Memory, and Chronic Unwellness in Sofi Oksanen’s Novels Stalin’s Cows and Dog Park”

Panel 2 (11:00-12:30): Placemaking and Displacement

Moderator: Zachary Fitzpatrick Ayşe Parla, “Fractured Geographies of Survival: Vartan İhmalyan, Communism, and the Afterlives of Genocide in Cold War Europe” Brandon Bloch, “German Expellees, the United Nations, and the Birth of the ‘World Refugee Problem’” Nana Osei-Kofi, “AfroSwedish Places of Belonging” *Lunch will be available for registered participants

Panel 3 (2:00-3:30): Challenging Racialized Paradigms

Moderator: Kathryn Ciancia Benjamin Mier-Cruz, “Embodied Memory in Swedish Visual Activism” Michelle Kahn, “Racism in Hitler’s Shadow: Turkish Challenges to West German Holocaust Memory Culture in the 1980s” Leonie Schulte, “Remembering and Forgetting in the Integration Classroom: Language and the Politics of Newcomer Belonging in Germany”

Concluding Discussion (4:00-5:15)

  Sponsored by: Center for German and European Studies Department of History Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ Department of Anthropology