Colloquium 'Migration, Gender and Social Justice'

Panel discussion on the project 'Migration, Gender and Social Justice'

Video and photo slideshow

Background

Half of the over 200 million international migrants in the world today are women.

Even greater numbers of women are involved in the intra-national migratory movements ongoing in, for example, China, India and Mexico. These women’s experiences and struggles have received disproportionately little attention, despite their huge scale and their importance for social foundations in the areas of origin, transit and destination.

Migration has long been presumed to mainly involve men, and mainly involve permanent shifts; and research has been dominated by concern with economic impacts, especially via remittances.

In the past two years the ISS has coordinated a project on ‘Migration, Gender and Social Justice’, for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada).

IDRC has during the past five or six years supported a series of research projects around the world about women’s migration, that look at the neglected gender dimensions of migration and their implications for social justice. The current project at ISS has been helping to convert that earlier project work and reports into studies that will reach wider audiences, of researchers and policy makers, and to situate this work in relation to other research.

About the colloquium

As part of the 60^th anniversary celebrations for ISS during the week of 8-13 October, 2012, this panel discussion will include:

• A presentation that outlines the project and some of the issues that it has tackled and that arise in this area of research and policy;
• A panel discussion, structured in terms of the selected issues. It will be opened by the panel members from outside ISS, and also include contributions from the floor.

All are welcome to attend this colloquium

Panelists

Han Entzinger, Prof. of Integration and Migration Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Eleonore Kofman, Prof of Gender, Migration and Citizenship, Middlesex University, UK 

Ruth Pearson, Prof of Development Studies, University of Leeds, UK

Helen Schwenken, Migration and decent work, Universität Kassel, Germany

T-D. Truong, project leader, ISS

Sylvia Bergh, ISS

Des Gasper, ISS

Chairperson: Jeff Handmaker, ISS

Researchers from Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Senegal, India, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines have participated in the synthesis project.

Some of the studies are on intra-national migration, most are on inter-national migration (including also to Spain, the Gulf States, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.).

A book will be published by Springer in 2013, with chapters that grow out of the work by these researchers and also chapters by others, as partner to a 2011 volume on Transnational Migration and Human Security (eds. T-D. Truong & D. Gasper); and also a series of policy-briefs.

See for more information:

This colloquium is one of the events taking place at ISS to celebrate it's 60th anniversary. For a full programme of the events taking place between 8 and 13 October, visit the Lustrum page on the ISS website.

For further information contact: Des Gasper (gasper@remove-this.iss.nl), Maria de Vargas (devargas@remove-this.iss.nl).