[URBANTH-L] CFP: Borders, irregular migration and gender in a global historical perspective (Netherlands)

[Angela Jancius]

Borders, irregular migration and gender in a global historical
perspective

Conference Leiden University, The Netherlands, January 18 - 19 2007
First Call for Papers

The last decade or two, many states struggle with issues of illegal
labour, the illegal residence of rejected asylum seekers, smuggling and
trafficking of people, and a whole range of other issues that are
somehow related to irregular immigration. Irregular migration is
perceived as growing in size and worsening in conditions. 

Irregular migration is, however, not a new phenomenon. It exists as long
as borders and immigration laws exist: in Western Europe at least since
1918 and in colonial situations already since the nineteenth century.
Furthermore, borders and regulations are not the whole story. After all,
migrant are often highly motivated people who are all but passive
recipients of policy measures. They - or their intermediaries - try to
create and exploit loopholes that arise out of the policies that deal
with immigration. This holds for people from all countries and for both
sexes, although a lot attention has gone rather one-sidedly to male
migrants. 

Male migrants were traditionally seen as the main players and women only
as passive followers. This picture has changed in recent decades. Many
studies stress that migration holds different risks for women than men.
Women tend to be more vulnerable to physical, sexual and verbal abuse
when travelling, they may face double discrimination in the receiving
societies and they are more likely to be dependent on intermediaries
such as informants, employers, human smugglers or traffickers. Moreover,
their position as "dependants" in the legal sense makes it more likely
that they have an instable residence status or none at all. Although all
these are important points, it should also be realized that women are
more than vulnerable victims of their circumstances. 

Our conference welcomes theoretically and empirically grounded
contributions on gendered migration patterns, experiences and struggles.
In contributions comparisons should be made between migrant men and
women (and hence the focus should not be on women only). Moreover, we
welcome contributions on the dynamics between immigration policies and
controls and strategies of migrant women and men. Finally we are very
interested in work on migration control in colonial and non-Western
contexts. 

The conference will be open to academics from a range of disciplines
including history, social sciences, international relations and law. 

The conference will be a speakers-only conference (as the Leiden
conference was on previous occasions). It will consist of a two-day
plenary session. The conference will be small scale, which will enable
the participants to go into the topic in detail. Papers will be written
and distributed before the conference, leaving plenty of time for
discussion at the conference itself. 

A selection of rewritten versions of the papers will be published
afterwards in a special issue of a relevant journal. 

If you are interested in taking part in the conference, you are invited
to submit a proposal (1 page) and cv before June 2006 to
m.l.j.c.schrover at let.leidenuniv.nl. You will be notified if the proposal
has been accepted before the end of June 2006.

If your proposal is accepted you will receive a position paper before
September 2006. You will be asked to submit a full length version of the
paper (8000 words) before December 2006. 

Participants to the conference, who present a paper, will not have to
pay the registration fee. We will provide hotel accommodation and meals
for the duration of the conference. Depending on final confirmation of
funding, travel expenses will be covered by the organisers, in the first
place for those participants who will need it most. 

The conference will take place at Leiden University in the Netherlands
on January 18 - 19 2007.

Contact information: Marlou Schrover: m.l.j.c.schrover at let.leidenuniv.nl

Organising committee Leiden University: Marlou Schrover, Chris Quispel ,
Leo Lucassen (all Migration History) and Joanne van der Leun (Faculty of
Law, department of Criminology)