Roundtable Discussion on City Scale and Cosmopolitan Cultures: Singapore and Manchester

Date: 21 November 2007
Time: 4pm
Location: FASS Research Cluster Meeting Room B, AS7 Shaw Foundation Building, Level 6, Singapore

• Jointly organized by FASS Migration Cluster and FASS Global Cities Cluster.
• Discussion Leader : Professor Nina Glick Schiller (Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, University of Manchester)

Cities are often equated with cosmopolitanism, that is, with an openness to the world that enhances global connections and peaceful, productive communications between individuals, cultures and regions. Yet, it often seems that urbanization- especially the kind of intensive restructuring of urban space that accompanies globalization- produces increased violence and criminality, isolated immigrant enclaves, and the loss of community. 'City Scale and Cosmopolitan Cultures' would examine the varying ways natives and foreigners become incorporated in cities that hold different 'scalar positions' within the global economy, where 'scalar positioning' is a summary term used to describe varying forms of global insertion including the degree to which a city contains centres of finance, commerce, or industry, command and control functions, communications hubs, or serves as a centre of knowledge, culture or tourism.

Dr. Nina Glick Schiller is the Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures and Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK, and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany. Her central and life long interest is in migration and she has been a major contributor to transnational migration theory. Her work on migration has led explorations a range of topics including: unequal globalization and transnational processes, the restructuring of cities, nationalism, ethnicity, and racialization, religion, citizenship, and the cultural construction of health and illness. Processes of racialization through which whiteness and various forms of otherness are constructed, reproduced, and embodied is a major theme of her scholarship on migration and nationalism. Although her initial field work was in Haiti and the United States, her interests in migration have more recently led Glick Schiller to conduct research for the past six years in Germany, to the development of a project in Sweden and into debates in the anthropology of Europe.  Glick Schiller’s recent research includes work with refugees and immigrants from Congo, Nigeria, Vietnam, Bosnia, Russia, the Sudan, and Iraq. Connecting forms of cultural representation--including religious, national, and ethnic identities-- with social action, and political economy, her writing, research and teaching speak to questions of both theory and public policy.  Her recent writings connect the neo-liberal rescaling of cities with forms of migrant incorporation and transnational connection. Dr. Glick Schiller has also conducted research in medical anthropology and is interested in looking at the relationship between variations in migrant health and health care utilization  and the scalar positioning of cities.