Mediterranean Displacements Project

11/03/2022

Don't miss the next event in the Sawyer Seminar at Rutgers Newark on November 16 at Express Newark from 3-5pm:

Migration, Displacement, and the Arts

The featured speakers will be:
- Alexandra Vázquez, Associate Professor, Performance Studies, New York University
- Yona Stamatis, Associate Professor, Ethnomusicology, University of Illinois Springfield
- Daniel Da Silva, Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University, New Brunswick and
- Amir ElSaffar, Musician/Composer

The event will be followed by an after party at ODR Studios between 6:00 and 11:00 pm featuring performances by:

Amir AlSaffar and Two Rivers ensemble, Janétza Miranda, singer-songwriter and classical Spanish guitarist of Taína descent from Newark, NJ and Debbie Ovalles, Afro-Caribbean and Brazilian dance

The event is co-organized by our Newark Campus Director Mayte Green Mercado and Rutgers University—Newark Professors Tim Raphael and Kim DaCosta Holton.

Get your free tickets at:

The third seminar in the Sawyer Seminar series at Rutgers Newark: "Natives and Nativists, Migrants and Immigrants in an American City."

07/21/2022

https://legation.org/talim-hosts-the-2022-aims-conference/?fbclid=IwAR14pOH9LJT-u9uPs5LK-0sKrD3xveHpM-nbF-5aMmVEFS2tnG85iFlVDfY

We hope you can join us virtually on Monday, July 25 and Tuesday, July 26 when we stream live on Facebook "An Aqueous Bridge: People and Objects in Motion in the Western Mediterranean from the Medieval to the Modern Eras."
This conference is sponsored and supported by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Spain-North Africa Project, the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
In person attendance is restricted for COVID mitigation purposes to participants/researchers, but we hope you'll be able to join us online for this fascinating conference.

The 2022 American Institute for Maghrib Studies’ Conference, entitled “An Aqueous Bridge: People and Objects in Motion in the Western Mediterranean from the Medieval to the Modern Eras&…

05/01/2022

We are SO excited to host The Mediterranean Seminar here at Rutgers-Newark on May 6 and 7th!

04/19/2022

We are thrilled to welcome Evan Jewell and Elena Isayev to the MDP lecture series! Don't miss their exciting talk: "Displacement and the Role of the Humanities: Towards a Manifesto?" on Wed. April 27 from 2:30-3:50 EST.

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/4v45h6pn

03/08/2022

Friends, don't miss the talk "Forced Migration Through the Eyes of Two Rutgers Refugee Graduate Students" on Wednesday, March 9, from 11:30-1:00. For zoom information please email Aslam Kakar at [email protected].

01/27/2022

The Division of Global Affairs Colloquium Speaker Series invites author and Professor Emeritus Kath Woodward to speak on Identities, Mobilities and Migration on Wednesday, February 2, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/96673301489?pwd=ODhDeVIvUkNxcVhqLys5aHlWRXV2UT09

Bio: Professor Kath Woodward is an author and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University, where she has chaired women's studies, sociology, and gender and technology courses at all levels. She is a member of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change and researches gender identities and diversity, most recently in sport.

Abstract: The concept of identity has moved in and out of fashion within scholarly discourse, from the 1980s when identity politics burst onto the scene, presenting an activist, egalitarian challenge to meta-theories such as those based on socio-economic class. Identity politics embraced ethnicity, race, gender, location, generation and disability and engaged with the minutiae of lived experience. Identities are multiple, hybrid and fluid. They are also oppositional, framed by a binary logic of us and them. John Berger called the 20th century the century of migration. The 21st century is already marked by massive movements of people across the globe; from the global south to the global north, from Africa to Europe. How can an understanding of identities help us to understand the inequalities as well as the differences in play? This talk revisits identities and theories of identity in light of 21st-century mobilities.

01/27/2022

Another great talk is coming up!

The Division of Global Affairs Colloquium Speaker Series invites author and Professor Emeritus Kath Woodward to speak on Identities, Mobilities and Migration on Wednesday, February 2, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/96673301489?pwd=ODhDeVIvUkNxcVhqLys5aHlWRXV2UT09

Bio: Professor Kath Woodward is an author and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University, where she has chaired women's studies, sociology, and gender and technology courses at all levels. She is a member of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change and researches gender identities and diversity, most recently in sport.

Abstract: The concept of identity has moved in and out of fashion within scholarly discourse, from the 1980s when identity politics burst onto the scene, presenting an activist, egalitarian challenge to meta-theories such as those based on socio-economic class. Identity politics embraced ethnicity, race, gender, location, generation and disability and engaged with the minutiae of lived experience. Identities are multiple, hybrid and fluid. They are also oppositional, framed by a binary logic of us and them. John Berger called the 20th century the century of migration. The 21st century is already marked by massive movements of people across the globe; from the global south to the global north, from Africa to Europe. How can an understanding of identities help us to understand the inequalities as well as the differences in play? This talk revisits identities and theories of identity in light of 21st-century mobilities.

01/25/2022

The Division of Global Affairs Colloquium Speaker Series, in collaboration with the Mediterranean Displacements Project, invites Dr. Cynthis H. Malakasis to speak to DGA students on The Future in Transit: “Displacement in Place” in Athens after the closure of the “Balkan route” on Wednesday, January 26th, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm. The talk is open to all Rutgers students! h

The Future in Transit: “Displacement in Place” in Athens after the closure of the “Balkan route”
Drawing on ethnographic research in Athens, Greece, from September 2016 to September 2017, I discuss how four pregnant Syrians striving to transit to northwestern Europe imagined and pursued life projects in a temporally indeterminate moment between mobility and settlement. Refugees who entered Greece in the short window after the closure of the Balkan route but before the infamous EU-Turkey Statement were able to evade confinement in the Greek islands and make their way to the mainland. There, however, they faced a border “remade […] within the city” (Cabot 2014:49), the geopolitically conditioned vicissitudes of the Greek and European asylum systems, and the combination of neglect and control inherent in the hastily put together apparatus of humanitarian aid, operating for the first time on EU soil. Through their experiences, I explore the multi-scalar structures and relations that block the path of refugees toward what they had planned and imagined as “normal lives,” as well as their understandings of and their agency in the face of inequality and injustice.

Cynthia’s Bio
I am a cultural anthropologist interested in nationalism, ethnicity, race, post-colonial dynamics with an emphasis on intra-European hierarchies, reproductive care, and Greece. My doctoral project, at Florida International University, examined whether and how post-1989, mass immigration to Greece challenged the country’s nationalist norms of collective belonging. From 2016 to 2020, I conducted ERC-funded, post-doctoral research on the maternity care of migrants and refugees in Athens. My upcoming research at Panteion University, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, will examine the institutional structures and affective relations of care formed with respect to gender-based violence during the Covid-19 pandemic in Greece

12/02/2021

MDP and Rutgers University-Newark will be hosting the Mediterranean Seminar on the topic of "Crisis" and Displacement, 6 and 7 May 2022! See CfP below. Deadline for Proposals is February 15th. We hope to see you all in Newark!

Paper proposals and round-table participants are being sought for the Mediterranean Seminar’s two-day Spring 2022 Workshop, to be held at Rutgers University-Newark on 6 & 7 May on the subject “Crisis and Displacement.”   The intense movement of people around the Mediterranean has dominated th...

09/15/2021

MDP friends, don’t miss this important event at Rutgers-Newark: “How to Help Afghan Refugees” on Thursday, Sept. 16. Register here: https://go.rutgers.edu/runafghan16

09/06/2021

Conference: The Morisco Diaspora and Morisco Networks across the Western and Eastern Mediterranean on 16-17 September 2021 on zoom. Organized by the EuQu project and IS-LI. Conveners: Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers.
https://t.co/kBUxQcairR?amp=1

08/16/2021

A collaborative symposium bringing together early modernists, medievalists, and classicists. | Hosted by Rutgers University.