Organized by the Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM) and the Department of Global Political studies (GPS), Malmö University

THE CONFERENCE THEME

As many European states are currently muddling through a deep economic crisis with repercussions on the political stability of many European societies, including the European Union as such, this conference will direct attention to the links between crisis and patterns of migration in, between and from various European countries and how this can be done from various analytical approaches.

Firstly, the noun perceptions direct attention to questions, both theoretical and empirical, about the nature of crisis and ideas about the root causes of migration, e.g. based on ontological presuppositions about man as basically sedentary or mobile. Possible sub-themes, work-shops, that concern this are (a) about the nature of crisis as such. Does crisis refer to financial or political conditions, or perhaps both? Does the crisis ultimately concern socio-cultural and/or socio-economic matters? How does crisis relate to modernity? Is crisis a permanent or temporal condition of modern societies? Another related theme (b) concerns the current tendency of many well-established nation-states to increasingly manage and control migration. Does crisis cause increased migration or is it rather the other way around; hence, increased migration has changed the parameters and demographic composition of many nation-states and thus triggered much political effort to enhance the control of migration?