Past Events
Here you will soon find a list of the highlights of our past events.
2015
Conference on Critical Migration and Border Studies, 1-2 September 2015
Returning home? Contexts and lived experiences of return migration
July 6th 2015, 2-5.30pm
Room 126, Geography building, Queen Mary University of London
2014
Migrant London in the Age of Neoliberalism
Brian Chikwava author of Harare North was in conversation with Dr Rachael Gilmour on the 22nd May 2014 at 6pm in the ArtsOne Lecture Theatre.
For more than the past hundred years Queen Mary has existed in the heart of migrant London, and the College has an impressive history of researching migration as a social phenomenon and in intervening in public debate. Given the intensification of migration in the present epoch, it is timely to re-launch the Centre and to invite those concerned about migration, from QMUL and from further afield, to attend this first event in what we hope will signal a revivified future for the Centre.
At this re-launch Brian Chikwava will address the question of migrant labour in contemporary London. He is the author of the magnificent novel Harare North, published by Vintage in 2009, which re-imagines the hallucinogenic, dispossessed lives of Zimbabwean migrants and refugees in Brixton. As Maggie Gee has noted, this is fiction which ‘turns the London you know upside down’. He will be in conversation with Dr Rachael Gilmour of the School of English and Drama.
Click here for a flyer about the event.
2012
International Conference: Travel History, Literatureand Film
2-3/7/2012
This international, multilingual and interdisciplinary conference, was organized jointly by the Centre for Catalan Studies (School of Languages, Linguistics and Film) and the Centre for the Study of Migration, both part of Queen Mary University of London. You can view the programme of the event.
Film screening: 'A Kid for Two Farthings' - 1/7/2012
In collaboration with the East End Film Festival the Centre for the Study of Migration took a look at the Jewish presence in 1950s East London with a screening of Carol Reed's 1955 feature film 'A Kid for Two Farthings'. Based on Wolf Mankowitz's novella the film follows Joe, a small boy who buys a one-horned goat in Petticoat Lane Market believing it to be a unicorn that will change his family's fortunes. Featuring fantastic location footage of post-war Whitechapel and a characterful cast (Diana Dors, Sid James, David Kossoff) the film is poetic and moving in equal measure. There was a short introductory talk by Dr. Gil Toffell. Further details
DISPLACEMENT, RESISTANCE, REPRESENTATION: Culture and Power in Contexts of Migrancy - 28-29/6/2012
The Centre's annual conference was held at Queen Mary and was FREE and OPEN to ALL. You can find the schedule and details of the event here.
ArtsTwo Opening 5-14/3/2012
A series of public events to mark the opening of the ArtsTwo building including lectures, readings, seminars, performances and film. A list of activities that took place can be found here.
2011
Social Cinema Scenes 25/11/2011
*Note This Event Was Cancelled*
Media Becomings: Toward a Nonlinear History of South Asian Media. Dr Rajinder Dudrah (Manchester) and Dr Amit Rai (Queen Mary)
In Pirate Modernity, Ravi Sundaram elaborates a vision of nonlinear media analysis that follows the vectors of practices, media flows, and affects. In this workshop on what is becoming through media, what is media becoming in South Asia, Dudrah and Rai engage with Pirate Modernity as a touchstone for thinking about the past, present, future of research in media ecologies.
Social Cinema Scenes is an ongoing series of research events investigating the social significance of cinema spaces across a range of historical and cultural contexts. Taking an intimate research colloquium format events seek to generate discussion between different disciplinary specialists to explore how geography, history, identity and aesthetics intersect within spaces of film exhibition.
Multiculturalism and Integration
Annual Guest Lecture 2011
November 1st 2011: 6.30pm
Professor Tariq Modood (Director, Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship) spoke on multiculturalism and integration in a lecture entitled 'Multiculturalism and Integration: struggling with confusions.'
Below you will find the full text of the speach as well as a video of the event.
Migration Across the Disciplines
Organized by Tendayi Bloom and Parvati Nair
30th June -1st July 2011
With this conference, the Centre for the Study of Migration brought together scholars, practitioners and performers from several continents. They work in the fields of: anthropology, geography, governance, languages, law, literature, media, medicine, philosophy, physics, and poltics. They expressed themselves through traditional academic papers, through poetry, through music, through film, through photography, and through insights from their daily practice. Based physically at the heart of Britain's migration story, were able to take a walking tour of London's East End and had a conference dinner at a local Lebanese restaurant.
9-29 May 2011 - Stephen Watts, writer and poet, was resident at the centre during this time. There was a series of four workshops that he conducted during his stay. Please see the announcement (doc) for further details.
