…in the age of the 21st century, we think the tripartite structure, “migration, logistics, and unequal citizens,” three interlinked operations, are the worldwide pressing question… Innovative forms of collaborative intellectual endeavor are needed.
JOYCE C.H. LIU
Chair Professor
Director of International Center for Cultural Studies
National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.
Problematics
Rapidly increasing international migrations have radically changed the outlook of contemporary 21st-century societies, producing cases of massive displaced and precarious lives, and bring various impacts upon local communities. These emerging phenomena have attracted critical scholarship both in the humanities and social sciences in recent years.
This CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute (GHI) on “Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context” invite applications from early career researchers and advanced graduate students from the interdisciplinary humanities and social science studies, including but not limited to literature, history, philosophy, film, audio-visual arts, performing arts, law, anthropology, sociology, journalism, social media, digital platform, and other forms of practitioners.
Through the analysis of documentaries, films, literature, interviews, archives, governmental policies, and cooperation with NGOs/CBOs and artist groups, this intensive program foregrounds the subjective experiences and perspectives of migrants, the violation of the migrants’ fundamental human rights, the citizen’s attitude against them, as well as the government malfunctioning in dealing with these migrants.
The issues of migration and unequal citizens highlight the logistical continuum of biopolitics and governmentality from the colonial to the post-colonial state, from the Cold War Era to the post-Cold War Era, as well as the operation of geopolitical and geo-economic apparatus and zoning politics. Critical logistics can orient the inquiry by emphasizing how the government of populations reaches beyond statistical measure to make new connections between life and work, technology and mobility, and politics and economy in and beyond any region. Logistics organizes the movement of people and goods and asserts its logic across the entire circuit of production, distribution, and consumption. Logistics has also remade the domain of global space and territory, through the operation of zoning politics, such as corridors, digital networks, extraction enclaves, financial districts, and other areas of transfer and exchange. Examining the nexus of migration and logistics offers ways of rethinking the politics of human mobility and the question of unequal citizens that not only reach beyond the logic of integration and identity but also question the standard analysis of post-war area studies.
This GHI will take place from 1st to 10th June 2021 at the International Center for Cultural Studies, NCTU, in Hsinchu, Taiwan.