I’m not going to cover the entire conference – it was 4 days long, with simultaneous panels. So I’ll briefly describe the whole experience and my impression of the organization, and then the two keynotes I attended that were both fascinating and well worth the travel to Amsterdam/Leiden.
The organization seems pretty young and relatively small – they don’t have the long lists of essentially honorary members that I’ve seen in other academic organizations. This was their 6th conference and their 10th anniversary – they hold conferences twice a year. The conference participants came from pretty much everywhere in Europe, with a healthy North American participation and some token representatives from other countries. I heard an excellent paper by a Brazilian scholar on Brazilians guest workers in Switzerland and Austria. Unfortunately the Northern Cypriot academic who I was looking forward to meeting was not able to attend. It is an incredibly multidisciplinary organization, with a great emphasis on the languages humanities – comparatists are naturally drawn to the organization, I guess – but also on history, sociology, anthropology. There was even a legal scholar, who interrogated the concept of detention and detention centers in a very provocative manner. I was a bit disappointed by the scholarship of many of the philologists though: close readings aren’t really a relevant way to deal with the issue of immigration, in my mind.
Undeniably the highlichts of the conference for me were the two keynotes I attended, by Saskia Sassen and by Hans Etzinger. Both of them addressed the issue of citizenship in different ways: Sassen discussed citizenship as an “assemblage” of civic rights, while Etzinger focused on immigrant integration and participation in the “host” society. They both drew on their latest book projects. Through very careful historical re-reading, Sassen interrogated the “stable” concept of citizenship, and questioned some of our assumptions about what constitutes a citizen. Etzinger was equally provocative: his research showed that second generation Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, though bearing the signs of being better adjusted to Dutch society than their parents (higher educational status, fluency and Dutch and so on) do not actually consider themselves as fully-integrated members of Dutch societ. (I had no idea the Netherlands had so many issues with identity and immigration, but it was a recurrent topic at the conference since many scholars were Dutch or at least working in Dutch universities and institutes).
Even though there was not enough history for my taste, and the one panel on theatre was depressingly short-sighted, this was definetely a conference worth attending.
