[URBANTH-L]ANN: Shaking Up Citizenship Conference Series (Amsterdam)

Angela Jancius jancius at ohio.edu
Mon Mar 5 18:43:08 EST 2007


On Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21, 2007, the Legal and Social
Sciences faculties of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) will be holding
an international conference:



Shaking up Citizenship


Nation, State and Transnational Actors



(Academic directors:Prof. Oscar Salemink, Dr. Ton Salman, Dr. Sarah van
Walsum, Dr. Remco Nehmelman)

       The conference will be held in Amsterdam. It will consist of two
events.

       First: a public talk to be given at 20:30 on Friday evening, April
20, 2007 by Saskia Sassen (author of The Global City, Globalisation and its
discontents, and Territory, Authority and Rights). This session will be
held  in downtown Amsterdam (Singelkerk: Singel 452), and will be organized
in collaboration with the 'Globalisation Lectures' team, in which Felix
Meritis, De Volkskrant, Lemniscaat and VPRO are represented.  (see further:
http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/dossiers/14337257/).

       Second: an academic meeting to be held on Saturday April 21, 2007,
at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. During this meeting, themes  that will
have been addressed on the Friday evening  will be discussed in more
detail, in the presence of Saskia Sassen:
          -                  regulating migration and citizenship;
          -                  identity politics;
          -                  managing essential utilities, media and
services in a transnational context.

       Invited speakers for the Saturday session are: Professor Peter Spiro
of Temple University,  Professor Nicholas De Genova of Colombia University
and Dr. Martin Lodge of the London School of Economics. Other participants
will include prominent faculty members of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

       Registration.
       There is no conference fee. However, for logistical reasons, a
registration deadline has been set at April 1st, 2007. If you wish to
register, please fill in the registration form below.


      Why such a conference?
     The conference organizers believe there is an urgent need to rethink
the concept of citizenship, and to closely examine changes that are
currently taking place in the relationship between nation, state and
transnational  actors.
The world as it is traditionally presented, on a globe or in a school
atlas, closely resembles a patchwork quilt. It is made up of discrete,
neatly delineated entities called nations, each with its own colour, shape
and history. While one "patch" may be larger than another, or more vividly
coloured, we are shown no fundamental differences between these nations.
Each in theory is autonomous and sovereign and in that sense  equal to the
others. And to a large degree, we are accustomed to think of nations as
discrete entities, each contained by its own borders and enclosing its own
population with its own "national character" and its own  political
institutions designed to rule its own affairs.
Many of our daily experiences however do not stroke any longer with this
picture. Just taking into consideration the trappings of daily life - food,
clothes, water, energy, care, belief, entertainment - we have  to conclude
that these are strongly interwoven with fields that lie far beyond our
"home patch". The same is true of the people we meet with daily: friends,
neighbours, colleagues - even our own families. There will  always be
someone, somewhere, who is somehow bound to "somewhere else". Most of us
ourselves have crossed countless borders for work, study or vacation.

So however rooted we may feel in our own "home patch", directly or
indirectly, we are connected in countless ways with people in other places
spread throughout the world. Looked at from this perspective,  the world
shouldn't be pictured as the patchwork quilt that we know from our school
atlases, but as something totally different, more like the image presented
to us by airlines showing the flight routes of  their fleet -  but then far
more complex, including not just the flight routes of one airline, but all
the trade routes and lines of communication that connect people to each
other everywhere: a vast and complex network of  relationships, movements
and interactions, held together by knots of varying degrees of intensity,
where greater or lesser numbers of connecting lines converge.
The purpose of the conference is to encourage interdisciplinary and
international exchange of insights, knowledge and ideas among expert
academics, political actors and students, on the consequences of
globalization processes, in particular in the realm of the state's role in
a) protecting 'national interests', in b) protecting its national citizens,
in c) observing international treaties on human (including migrating
human's ) rights, and in d) fostering free international trade and commerce
- and in particular, on the intricacies of reconciling these diverging
obligations. At stake are the changing statures and prerogatives of the
states, and the status of both 'traditional' and 'wandering' citizens.
         The purpose of the conference is to encourage interdisciplinary
and international exchange of insights, knowledge and ideas among expert
academics, political actors and students, on the consequences of
globalization processes, in particular in the realm of the state's role in
a) protecting 'national interests', in b) protecting its national citizens,
in c) observing international treaties on human (including migrating
human's ) rights, and in d) fostering free international trade and commerce
- and in particular, on the intricacies of reconciling these diverging
obligations. At stake are the changing statures and prerogatives of the
states, and the status of both 'traditional' and 'wandering' citizens.


       Further information:

       Please check the conference website for up-to-date information:
www.rechten.vu.nl/conferencecitizenship



Shaking up Citizenship
Nation, State and Transnational Actors


Registration form

N.B. for logistical reasons, registration forms must be submitted before
April 1st 2007.


Please register me for the conference "Shaking up Citizenship", to be held
in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, April 20th and 21st, 2007.

Name: 

Institution: 

Mailing address: 



e-mail address: 

telephone number: 

*I shall/shall not be attending Saskia Sassen¹s Globalization lecture in
the Singel Kerk,  Friday evening April 20th, 20:30.
* Please indicate.


Please complete this form and submit it

via e-mail to : els at rechten.vu.nl NB: Please name as subject: citizenship
conference.

Or via post to: Els Heppner
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid
Afdeling Staats- en bestuursrecht
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands


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