Professor Roger Waldinger (University of California)
Speaking at the CSDC Friday, May 26, 2017 McGill University
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Roger Waldinger is one of the world’s leading sociologists of international migration and has a keen interest in the political dimension of international migration. He was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow and received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012. Among the topics he has worked on are the political shifts that migration entails for migrants as well as sending and receiving societies. On the macro-level how does migration change and challenge the institution of citizenship and how does modern citizenship and states challenge the affiliations and involvements of migrants? In his most recent book “The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and their Homelands”, published by Harvard University Press in 2015 he examines the paradox at the core of the migratory phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together socially, economically and politically. For example residing in a democratic state, emigrants mobilize to produce change in the homelands they left, while emigration states extend their influence across boundaries to protect nationals and retain their loyalty. These issues speak directly to the Citizenship and Diversity themes of the CSDC. Given that this work is at the intersection of Sociology and Political Science his work will likely be of interest across the disciplines represented in the CSDC and provide opportunities for collaboration. Roger Waldinger has repeatedly offered workshops for students and has taught summer academies funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is fluent in French and has been a visiting scholar at prestigious French institutes such as EHHESS, Sciences Po and the University of Amsterdam. This series is sponsored by the Inter-university Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (https://csdc-cecd.ca/) which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).