CGT News

Reconceptualizing Migration: Panelist Bios

CGT is proud to welcome these scholars to Reconceptualizing Migration: Economies, Societies, Bio-Politics, a two-day conference held on April 2-3, 2009. For more information about this event, please see http://cgt.columbia.edu/about/news/2009/03/05/conference_reconceptualizing_migration_economies_societies_bio_politics/

Stephanie Buechler is a Research Associate in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on poverty, livelihoods, migration, gender, and development in central Mexico,southern India and northern Mexico. She is currently a Fulbright scholar conducting research on migration, economic crisis, climate change in Sonora, Mexico. Some of her most recent publications include: Gender and the Management of Water and Land in Rural Mexican Communities (co-edited), "Women at the Helm of Irrigated Agriculture in Mexico: the Other Side of Male Migration" in Opposing Currents: The Politics of Water and Gender in Latin America, and various journal articles in the Journal of Environment and Development, Gender and Development, and Anthropos.

Ayse Caglar is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. Her research interests include globalization and transnationlism processes; international migration; urban dynamics and restructuring; transnational legal spaces; and nationalism and nationalist discourses. Some of her more recent work includes "Hometown Associations, the Rescaling of State Spatiality and Migrant Grassroots Transnationalism" in Global Networks (2006, 6:1-22) and her forthcoming co-edited book with Nina Glick Schiller, Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants (Cornell University Press).

Ayça Çubukçu is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Committee on Global Thought. She received a Ph.D. with Distinction in political anthropology from Columbia University in May 2008. Her research is concerned with the politics and history of human rights, discourses of "humanity," and international law, as well as global social movements. Her publications include "On the Uneven Geography of Islamic Globalization: The Fact of Iraqi Constitution, the Fatalism of Human Rights," monograph published by the Academy of Latinity (Rio de Janeiro, 2009); "Paradoxes of Sovereignty: War, Justice and the World Tribunal on Iraq" (Princeton, 2006), monograph published by World Politics/Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and "Can the Network Speak?" a review of Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, published in the Arab Studies Journal (2005).

Nicholas De Genova is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Latino Studies at Columbia University. His books include Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago (Duke University Press, 2005) and The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Duke University Press, forthcoming, co-edited with Nathalie Peutz).

C. Cindy Fan is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include population geography, regional development, post-Mao China (regional policy, migration, inequality, and gender), ethnicity, quantitative methods. She has done extensive research on China's migration and related issues. She recently authored the book China on the Move: Migration, the State, and the Household (Routledge, 2008).

Christina Gabriel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Carleton University. Her research focuses on citizenship and migration; gender and politics; and regional integration and globalization. She has co-authored with Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity and Globalization (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002) and is the co-editor with Hélène Pellerin of Governing International Labour Migration (UK: Routledge, 2008).

Athar Hussain is the Director of Asia Research Centre at the London School of Economics. His research interests include economic transformation, enterprise reform, education, regional inequality, social security, and other issues in China and other Asian regions.

David Jacobson is a Professor in the School of Global Studies at Arizona State University. He has worked extensively in the area of immigration and citizenship, focusing primarily on Western Europe and the United States. His books include Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Place and Belonging in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

Ahmed Kanna is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College for 2008-09. A cultural anthropologist, his research focuses on the cultural, political, and social dimensions of space, urbanization, and architecture. He recently edited The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2008).

Anush Kapadia is Phd candidate in the Dept. of Anthropology at Columbia University. His research interests include the political economy of central banking in particular and global financial markets in general.His dissertation examines the political economy of the emerging financial architecture in India.

Sandro Mezzadra is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics, Institutions and History of the University of Bologna. His research has focused on the classical modern European political philosophy (especially on Hobbes, Spinoza and Marx), on the history of political, social, and legal sciences in Germany between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, on several issues at stake in the development of contemporary political theory, and most recently, the relationship between globalization, migration and citizenship.

José Antonio Ocampo is a Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs and Director of the Program in Economic and Political Development at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He has also worked with the United Nations and the Government of Colombia, most notably as United Nations Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs. His recent publications include Stability with Growth: Macroeconomics, Liberalization and Development, with Joseph E. Stiglitz, Shari Spiegel, Ricardo French-Davis and Deepak Nayyar (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Demetrios Papademetriou is President and Board Member of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank dedicated to the study of international migration. He holds and has held a wide range of senior positions including the convener of the Translantic Council on Migration and the Athens Migration Policy Initiative and the Chair of the Migration Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Director for Immigration Policy and Research at the U.S. Department of Labor. In addition, he has held various teaching positions including at Duke University, and the New School for Social Research. His publications include: Gaining from Migration: Towards a New Mobility System, OECD Development Center (co-author, 2007); Immigration and America's Future: A New Chapter (2006, co-author), Migration and the Economic Downturn: What to Expect in the European Union (co-author, 2009) and Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis: Research Evidence, Policy Challenges, Implications(co-author, 2009).

Katharina Pistor is the Michael I. Sovern Professor of law at Columbia Law School where she teaches Corporations, Lawyering in Multiple Legal Orders, Globalization in Comparative Perspective, and Law and Capitalism. Her major fields of interest are comparative law; comparative institutional economics; corporate law and corporate governance, and European law. Her recent publications include Tales from Transition Economies (forthcoming Columbia Journal for Transnational Law, 2008) and Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal About Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World (with Curtis Milhaupt); University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Carl Riskin is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at Queens College of the City University of New York and a Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Insititute at Columbia University. His research interests include the modern economic history of China and development economics. His current work focuses on poverty reduction and increasing income inequality in modern China. He has published five books and numerous articles in these areas. In addition to his academic work, he has published numerous reports for the United Nations Development Programme.

Francisco Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Latin American Studies at Wesleyan University. His research focuses on economic growth, political economy and international trade. He served as Chief Economist of the Venezuelan National Assembly from 2000 to 2004 and has held teaching positions at University of Maryland, College Park and the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought,  Columbia University (www.columbia.edu/~sjs2/). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), and A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007).

Svati P. Shah is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Women's Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on the political economy of migration and sex work. In addition to her research, she has been a part of secularist, LGBT rights, and feminist movements in the United States and in India.

Nicholas Van Hear is a Senior Researcher with the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. His background is in Anthropology and Development Studies. He has worked on forced migration, development and related issues for many years, with field experience in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South Asia. He is the author of New Diasporas (University of Washington Press, 1998) and Catching Fire (co-edited with Christopher McDowell, Lexington Books, 2006).

Monica Varsanyi is an Associate Professor of Government at John Jay College. Her research and teaching interests include urban politics and federalism, immigration and citizenship law and policy; and political, legal, and urban geography. Her current projects focus on the growing tensions between local and state grassroots immigration policy activism and the U.S. federal government's plenary power over immigration as well as the expanding involvement of city police in immigration enforcement and the impact on the relationship between local police and (unauthorized) immigrant communities.

Feng Wang is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on comparative demographic, economic, and social processes, social inequality in state socialisms, contemporary Chinese society. His has published a new book recently, Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2008). He is currently working on a project that documents and analyzes internal migration and social reintegration in China.

Michael Willenbuecher is an anthropologist, translator, performer, and activist with the anti-racist network Kanak Attak in Berlin. He is also the author of the 2007 book, The Hinge of Power: the ‘Illegal Migrant' as Homo Sacer of Europe. The curators of the "Colonial Planning" exhibition commissioned his recent performance which addressed the nationalism of socio-scientific discourses.

Yao Lu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on demography and social stratification in a variety of settings, including China, Indonesia, South Africa, and the United States. She is particularly interested in studying the dynamics and consequences of the migration process