New perspectives on diaspora

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Time: 2.00pm - 3.30pm
Price: free
Speaker(s): Dr Ipek Demir

All are welcome to this event, which is running as part of the Criminology, Politics and Sociology Seminar Series 2021-22.

All seminars will be run entirely online through MS Teams. Please register online and you will be sent the MS Teams link the day before and again on the day of the event. 

Speaker

Dr Ipek Demir is Associate Professor of Sociology, and Director of Centre for Ethnicity and Racism, University of Leeds (UK). Demir's research and publications sit at the intersections of the fields of race, diaspora studies, ethno-politics, nationalism, decoloniality, indigeneity, global politics as well as epistemology and interdisciplinarity. Her work has been funded by the EU as well as by national UK agencies such as the ESRC and the AHRC. Before joining Leeds, Demir worked at the University of Leicester and also at the University of Cambridge. Her forthcoming book is entitled Diaspora as Translation and Decolonisation (2022, MUP) and introduces a new theoretical framework for understanding diaspora, and focuses on how diasporas from the Global South decolonise the Global North.

Abstract
Despite the ‘diasporisation of diaspora' (Brubaker 2005), diaspora has been trapped in methodologically nationalist perspectives which see diaspora as emerging out of ‘ethno-political' struggles within nation-states, often told from a perspective of push factors. This has brought limitations to understandings of diaspora. My talk will reveal and analyse some these limitations – limitations which I discuss in detail in my forthcoming book Diaspora as Translation and Decolonisation (MUP). I will pay attention to how such conceptualisations have erased the links between empire and diaspora, and also how these have reproduced methodologically nationalist perspectives, lacking an understanding of how diasporas of the Global South have intervened and decolonised the Global North.  The talk will seek to expand understandings of diaspora by weaving translation and decolonisation into examinations of diaspora.

Other events in this series
Wednesday 15 December: Book presentation: ‘Navalny Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?'
Wednesday 12 January: The paradigm shift and migrant integration: Is something rotten in the state of Denmark?
Wednesday 23 March: Media representations in Russia

For further information about this event:

Contact: Dr Dogus Simsek
Email: D.Simsek@kingston.ac.uk