This workshop is organised in the context of the study programme EMMIR - for readings and further information please contact emmir@uol.de

workshop by Prof. Dr. Ranabir Samaddar

Outline
Stephen Castles has almost singlehandedly reshaped the field of migration studies through his stupendous writings in the last forty years or so. A combination of sociology, political economy, and global studies backed by immense scholarship marks his writings. They are mostly dry, factual, minimally theoretical, and strive to be balanced in the sense of being careful to be holistic by not excluding any factor. His co-authored The Age of Migration is a compulsory text book in migration studies across the globe, particularly in the countries of the north. The Age of Migration appearing in the early years of the last decade of the last century carries the imprint of Castles’ approach and works. It is difficult to find any big loophole in the successive editions of The Age of Migration (the fifth edition coming out in 2013).
Does this mean that The Age of Migration does not bear the footprints of time? Or, his writings do not show a trajectory? One way to look at this question will to be to see if in trying to be holistic, he ignored any required emphasis on certain factors or elements. It is said one requires at times pushing thoughts to extreme.
From this perspective, it will be important to examine (a) if through the long years of writings beginning with the co-authored Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe published by the Institute of Race Relations in London in 1973 he has maintained as the main analytic framework for studying migration trends the combination of race, class, and political economy that he proposed in that book; (b) if the category of “culture” gradually displaced political economy as a critical tool of analysis in his writings; © consequently, if ethnicity became increasingly a conceptual tool of greater importance; and finally (d) whether in proposing our age as the “age of migration” he implied any historical comparison with other ages, yet on the other hand he refrained from using historical tools in understanding migration in critical historical phases of at least capitalism.
Stephen Castles shows acute awareness of how migration regulation policies have shaped over time and has asked if the two events – the incident on 9/11 in 2001 and the financial crash of 2008 have impacted on migratory trends in our time. Yet a study of migration control practices has not invoked in his writings the need to analyse the relation between forced migration and migration, or the dynamics of institutional practices of security and control, or finally the need to employ the concept of border as a method to study migration and labour. Yet in the second decade of the twenty first century, the notion of migration is being made more receptive to other realities by the use of related notions such as mobility, borderlands, displacement, etc. Concepts move in groups or families. They are like signifiers working in tandem and suggest reality that cannot be understood by a single term. Shall we then say that Stephen Castles’ works prepare an empirical map which is deceptive, which disguises, displaces, and reconfigures other realities of migration?
All these questions call for a post-colonial engagement with this great scholar’s writings. This paper will be an attempt towards that task.

Readings
tba

Bionote
Ranabir Samaddar belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. He has worked extensively on issues of migration and forced migration, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue was a culmination of his long work on justice, rights, and peace. His recent political writings published in the form of a two-volume account, The Materiality of Politics (2007), and The Emergence of the Political Subject (2009) have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation-state, and have signaled a new turn in critical postcolonial thinking. His co-authored work on new town and new forms of accumulation Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (Routledge, 2013) takes forward urban studies in the context of post-colonial capitalism. He is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group.