Spaces of Difference

M. Teresa Cappiali is a PhD student in Political Science at the Université de Montréal. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto (Canada) in 2014 and 2015 and at the European University Institute (Italy) in 2013 and 2014. Her PhD dissertation, Activism and Participation Among People of Migrant Background: Discourses and Practices of Inclusion in Four Italian Cities, examines why and how non-EU citizens get involved in politics and whether they are able to challenge existing relations of power and become Subjects of political transformation. Based on extensive fieldwork in Italy between 2013 and 2014, the empirical research explores diverging and converging trajectories of individual and collective participation by non-European migrants in both conventional and non-conventional channels at the local level. Her research interests include immigration and integration from a multilevel perspective; Immigrants’ political participation; social movement theories; post-colonial and migration theories; racial and ethnic studies; democratic citizenship and cities. She has written two articles on left-wing actors and participation of immigrants in Italy (now under revision) and she is now working on an article of the role of non-state actors in promoting participation of people of migrant background.

Rebecca Ferrari is a doctoral researcher in Anthropology at the University of Trier and a member of the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces”. She completed her B.A. at the SOAS in London, where she started to develop an interest in urban anthropology and migrant livedexperiences. During her Master degree studies at the EHESS in Paris, she explored questions with regard to spaces and phenomenological anthropology by focusing on homelessness. Her doctoral dissertation project primarily draws on storytelling about migratory experiences of first generation Algerian women living in Paris.

Heike Härting is Associate Professor of Canadian and Postcolonial Studies at the Université de Montréal. She specializes in Canadian literature and criticism, postcolonial literary studies, and diaspora and globalization studies. She has also worked on narrative theory and rhetoric, focusing on the development of a postcolonial practice and politics of metaphor in contemporary Canadian fiction. Härting won a Government of Canada Award from the International Council for Canadian Studies and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. She co-edited Discourses of Security, Peacekeeping Narratives, and the Cultural Imagination in Canada (University of Toronto Quarterly, Special Issue, 2009), and Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Special Issue, 2009). Her other publications include essays on Margaret Atwood, Anita Rau Badami, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Wole Soyinka in such journals as ARIEL, Third Text, and Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en Littérature Canadienne.

Ursula Lehmkuhl is Professor of International History at the University of Trier and director of the International Research Training Group Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces. Her research interests include migration history, colonial history, environmental history, and the history of international relations. She has published several books, among them Pax Anglo-Americana: Machtstrukturelle Grundlagen anglo-amerikanischer Asien- und Fernostpolitik in den 1950er Jahren (1999), From Enmity to Friendship: Anglo-American Relations in the 19th and 20th Century (2005) (co-edited with Gustav Schmidt), Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History (co-edited with Hermann Wellenreuther) (2007), Regieren ohne Staat? Governance in Räumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit (2007) (co-edited with Thomas Risse), and Provincializing the United States (2014) (coedited with Norbert Finzsch and Eva Bischoff). She is currently working on a book enTitled Das Dilemma der Gleichheit: Die Konstruktion und Repräsentation von ‘Vielfalt’ und ‘Differenz’ im euro-atlantischen Raum des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.

Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink is Professor of Romance Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication at Saarland University. He holds a PhD in Romance Philology (Bayreuth, Germany) and in History (EHESS, France) and is co-director of the International Research Training Group Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces. His research fields concern cultural transfers between France and Germany and between Europe and non-European societies, conceptual history, francophone literatures and medias (Québec, Sub-Saharan Africa), and the theory of intercultural communication. Recent books: (co-edited with Christoph Vatter): Multiculturalisme et diversité culturelle dans les médias au Canada et au Québec (2013); (co-edited with Aurélien Boivin and Jacques Walter): Régionalismes littéraires et artistiques comparés. Québec/Canada – Europe (2014); Le livre aimé du peuple. Les almanachs québécois de 1777 à nos jours (2014); (co-edited with Marc-André and Clorinda Donato): Jesuit Accounts on the Colonial Americas. Intercultural Transfers, intellectual Disputes, and Textualities (2014); (co-edited with Sylvère Mbondobari): Villes coloniales/métropoles postcoloniales. Représentations littéraires, images médiatiques et regards croisés (2015); (co-edited with Michel Espagne): Transferts de savoirs sur l’Afrique (2015).

Chowra Makaremi is a tenured researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Issues (Iris), EHESS, Paris. Her research focuses on issues of security, migration control, the anthropology of law and the state, and processes of Subjectivation at the margins. She completed a PhD in anthropology at the Université de Montréal with Mariella Pandolfi, based on an ethnography of border confinement for undocumented migrants in France. She also conducted research on delinquency courts in France, the everyday experience of justice, policies of delinquency repression, punishment and the moral economy of adjudication. She has co-edited Enfermés dehors: enquête sur le confinement des étrangers (with C. Kobelinsky 2009), and co-authored Juger, réprimer, accompagner: essai sur la morale de l’Etat (with D. Fassin et alii 2013). Her current research explores a genealogy of state violence in post-revolution Iran. She has published Aziz’s Notebook: At the Heart of the Iranian Revolution (2011). She has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, Columbia University (MESAS), and the McGill Faculty of Law.

Laurence McFalls is Professor of Political Science at Université de Montréal as well as director of the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes and of the International Research Training Group Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces. His research interests include social theory, German politics and culture since re-unification, GDR history and memory politics, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and the emergence of new modes of therapeutic domination. His recent books are Construire le politique: causalité, contingence et connaissance (2006) and Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered (2007). Together with Mariella Pandolfi, he has published numerous articles and book chapters offering a critical analysis of contemporary humanitarian and neoliberal politics.

Carolyn Podruchny is an Associate Professor of History at York University. Her research interests include Indigenous and French history in northern North America, Canadian colonial history, cultures, and environments. She is author of Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (2006) and she is a co-editor of Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility, and History (with Nicole St-Onge and Brenda Macdougall 2012), Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories (with Laura Peers 2010), and Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500–1700 (with Germaine Warkentin 2001). She is currently working on the history of fur trade stories and the linguistic encounters between Anihsinaabemowin and French.

Dave Poitras currently holds the position of doctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of Trier within the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces”. His research interest in issues concerning nation and nationalism goes back to his M.Sc. at the Department of Sociology and the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at the Université de Montréal. His master thesis, which he wrote after a year of fieldwork as a visiting researcher at the Institut de Sociologie of the Université libre de Bruxelles, focused on everyday nationhood in Flanders, Belgium. Since then, he has published articles such as Le cas de la Tour d’Yser en Flandre : mémoire, monuments commémoratifs et aménagement urbain (2013), and Une mise en scène du rapport à la nation en Cacanie. Le déclin d’un empire à l’ ère des nationalismes européens (2014).

Sophie Schram is a doctoral researcher at the University of Trier within the IRTG Diversity. She is affiliated with the faculty of political science at the University of Trier and associated with the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance at the Université de Montréal. She holds university degrees in European Studies and Intercultural Communication from the LSE London, the Freie Universität Berlin, Saarland University and Université de Lorraine, and has on-site experience in the field of transnational cooperation and political assistance in France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the European Union. Her research interests include regional and transnational integration, multilevel political systems, and the politics of ideas in the European Union and Canada. In her PhD, she investigates how the framing of trade policies impacts upon potential policy choices by comparing French and Quebec political discourse on the Comprehensive and Economic Trade Agreement (2006–2014). Reaching beyond the dichotomy between interest-based and ideational approaches, she contends that political actors can use ideas strategically.

Jesse Thistle (Metis, Cree) is currently doing an MA at the University of Waterloo, and is a recent BA graduate of York University. His research interests are Indigenous history, especially Metis, Canadian colonization, Metis health research, homelessness, and addiction studies. He has published articles on HIV in contemporary Canadian reserves, Canadian policies on homelessness, his family history, and his journey to sobriety. He is currently researching Metis history in Toronto, northern Ontario, and road allowance communities in Saskatchewan.

Nikola Tietze is a sociologist at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung and associate researcher at the Centre d’Analyse et d’Interventions Sociologiques at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). Following a political science diploma at the Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin in 1993, she completed her PhD dissertation in 1999 at the EHESS, Paris, and her habilitation at the University of Hamburg in 2013. She has taught in Bordeaux, Paris and Hamburg. Her research focuses on the sociology of Europe, immigration, and religion. She now works on the transformations linked to post-sovereign state power in Europe and the regulation of conflict practices. With Ulrike Jureit, she recently published a book enTitled Postsouveräne Territorialität. Die Europäische Union und ihr Raum (2015).

Xymena Wieczorek holds the position of a doctoral researcher in the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces” at the University of Trier. She is affiliated with the Department of Sociology. Her research interests include transnationalism, migration and mobility studies, social inequality, gender studies, and methods of qualitative social research. She attained an M.A.-degree in sociology and American studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where she has worked in several research projects dealing with contemporary migration. She is currently working on her PhD thesis about the mobility experiences of young adults of Polish heritage in Germany and Canada.

In der Vergangenheit dominierten Migrationstheorien, die eine Vogelperspektive einnahmen und deren Erklärungen für komplexe Wanderungsentscheidungen begrenzt waren. Die Perspektive betroffener Menschen und ihrer Kontexte einzunehmen, bereichert die Diskussion und liefert interessante Ansätze zum Verständnis von Wanderungs-, Integrations- und Partizipationsprozessen. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass diese Ansätze konstruktiv aufgegriffen und weiter entwickelt werden. – Andreas Siegert auf: socialnet.de