The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility hosted a lecture by Nando Sigona entitled “The Camp as a Space of Political Membership,” with discussion from professor Michel Agier on February 17, 2015, in the Klein Conference Room at 66 W. 12th Street. Below is a video of that event.
Drawing on an ethnography of informal refugee camps for Kosovo forced-migrants in Italy, this talk argued for a resident-centred understanding of camps and camp-like institutions in refugee studies. It invited a closer examination of the everyday life in camps and the embodied practices and claims of citizenship that inhabitants perform. Sigona discussed the concept of “campzenship” as a tool for capturing both the spatiality of membership and the specificity of contemporary camps.
Dr. Nando Sigona is Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK where he teaches sociology of migration and citizenship. He leads the workstream on Theory and Methods in the Institute of Research into Superdiversity. He is also Research Associate at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and Refugee Studies Centre, both at the University of Oxford. His research interests include: statelessness, diasporas and the state; Romani politics and anti-Gypsyism; ‘illegality’ and the everyday experiences of undocumented migrant children and young people; and governance and governmentality of forced migration in the EU.
His work has appeared in a range of international academic journals, including Sociology, Social Anthropology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Identities, Citizenship Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is author or editor of books and journal special issues, including Romani politics in contemporary Europe: poverty, ethnic mobilisation and the neoliberal order (with Nidhi Trehan, Palgrave, 2009), Refugee Community Organisations and Dispersal: Networks, Resources and Social Capital (with David Griffiths and Roger Zetter, Policy Press, 2005), The Roma in the new EU: Polices, Frames and Everyday Experiences (with Peter Vermeersch, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2012), and Rifugio Europa? (Studi Emigrazione, 2006). He recently edited (with Fiddian Qasmiyeh, Loescher and Long) The Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-authored (with Bloch and Zetter) Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants (Pluto Press, 2014). Nando is also Associate Editor of Migration Studies, published by Oxford University Press.
Michel Agier is Professor of Anthropology at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Director of Research at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement. Prof. Agier is also Visiting Scholar at the New School for Social Research (2015).
The Event was part of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility 2014-15 Lecture Series “Rethinking Refugee Spaces: Architecture, Design, and Politics.”
