Despite decades of policy-research dialogue integration within the context of migration-mobility remains a contested concept. This project aims to challenge existing binaries in migration, multiculturalism and integration research by conducting research into the dialogical relations between place and practices of belonging and integration.
About the programme
As its name indicates, the programme takes a broadly performative approach to social, political and cultural research. Much of our research shares the premise that social, political and cultural ‘realities’ are perpetually reconstituted by being enacted – in contested and often counterintuitive ways – by subjects who simultaneously constitute and re-constitute themselves through these continuous reenactments. The programme thus also places emphasis on how social methods (as part of social life) play a role in sustaining, abandoning or transforming subjects, objects and spaces.
Members of the programme operationalize these ontological, epistemological and methodological premises in research on citizenship, security and insecurity, migration, asylum, democracy, justice, and Europe. Citizenship, for instance, is interrogated not simply from the perspective of those with the legal status of citizenship – rather, we investigate how migrants, asylum seekers and other non-citizens challenge conventional notions of citizenship through their demands and acts. In this way Enactments also addresses the intertwinement of methods, people, things and places and what it means to change, innovate, and challenge social and political orders.
The programme’s first forum, Enacting Worlds, featured a keynote lecture on 'Enacting Values: On Good and Bad Food' by Annemarie Mol, Professor of Anthropology of the Body, University of Amsterdam. More recent Enactments events included CCIG forums on Enacting methods and CCIG lecture series.
The programme’s 2015-2016 calendar will include workshops and events on global justice; the UK-EU referendum; mobility, mobilisation & citizenship; and boundary-making around ‘Europe’.
The programme currently hosts the following related Projects:
- Oecumene (funded by the European Research Council): An exploration of how the concept of citizenship is being refigured and renewed around the globe
- Placing Ourselves: An investigation into local practices of belonging and integration
Some recent publications by Enactment members include:
Czajka, A. 2014 – Migration in the Age of the Nation-state: Migrants, Refugees and the National Order of Things. Alternatives. 39(3):151-163
Czajka, A. and B. Isyar (Eds.). 2013. Europe After Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.]
Isin, Engin F. ed. (2015). Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory. Palgrave Studies in Citizenship Transitions. London: Palgrave.
Korkut, Umut; Mahendran, Kesi ; Buckan-Knapp, Gregg and Cox, Robert Henry (2015). Introduction: Discursive governance: operationalization and applications. In: Korkut , Umut; Mahendran, Kesi; Buckan-Knapp, Gregg and Cox, Robert Henry eds. Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the Public Sphere. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–11.
Prokhovnik, Raia (2015). From sovereignty in Australia to Australian sovereignty. Political Studies, 63(2) pp. 412–430.
