Nina Glick Schiller
Visiting 成人大片
Fall 2025
Research focus while a CERC Scholar - Emplacing Dispossession: Migrant Services and the Migration Industry
Using the term 鈥榤igration industry,鈥� migration scholars have increasing outlined some of the agents, intermediaries, the increasing imposition of technological boundaries and barriers to human movement and resettlement, the exploitation of carceral labor within private detention centers, and the growth of the humanitarian sector. Within the discussions of the migration industry, the term infrastructure has begun to be adopted to focus attention on the organizations and actors who continually process individuals into refugees and migrants within a system of control and representation. These terms make it clear it that displacement, movement, and border maintenance are activities that are integrally related to processes of capital accumulation through dispossession and that these accumulative processes include the humanitarian sector providing migrant services. To integrate an analysis of the provision of local migrant services, including the use of volunteer labour, into the globe-spanning discussion of the migration industry and its profit \-making mechanisms, Nina will explore the governance, funding, and provision of services for migrants in the city of Halle/ Saale Germany in 2022-2023. The research took place during the first months of the Ukrainian war when large numbers of Ukrainians were seeking refuge in other countries.
To date, relatively little of the research devoted to the humanitarian sector as an industry have examined the delivery of migrant services by local organizations in cities of settlement. This research three questions through an examination of migration services in the city of Halle: (1) If migration is an industry then what is the commodity it produces?; (2) What kind of an industry is it that relies on so many unpaid volunteers; (3) Why does this industry primarily provide services in the form of short-term projects administered by temporary low waged staff?
Related to CERC research theme: Migration of the City and The Governance of Migration in a Globalising World (opens in new window)
Career Achievements
Nina Glick Schiller is Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester, UK and University of New Hampshire, USA, founding editor of Identities and co-editor of Anthropological Theory. Her research topics include urbanism, urban regeneration, transnational migration, migration services, migration and development, critiques of methodological nationalism and the ethnic lens, racialization and power, dispossession and displacement, cosmopolitan sociability, and the construction of risk. She has conducted research in Haitian, USA, UK, and German cities. Her books include: Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and the Deterritorialized Nation-States, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home, Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, Cosmopolitan Sociability: Locating Transnational Religious and Diasporic Networks, Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontent, Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants; and Migrants and City Making: Dispossession, Displacement and Urban Regeneration.
Relevant Publications
Books
(2018) Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration Duke University Press (Ayse Caglar, co-author)
(2015) Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontent (A. Irving co-ed.) Berghahn. (paperback 2017)
(2013) Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power (N. Salizar, co-ed.), Routledge
Edited Special Issues
(2018) Transnational Migration Regimes; Altered Terrains. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 8(4) (with M Frykman)
(2018) Civility: Global Perspectives. Anthropological Theory 18:2-3 (with S. Thiranagama,T. Miller, C. Forment)
Published peer reviewed articles and book chapters
(2023) 鈥淐onnecting place and placing power: a multiscalar approach to mobilities, migrant services and the migration industry鈥� Mobilities 18(4).
(2023) 鈥淢igrants are the City鈥�: Commentary on 鈥淟ondon: Diversity and Renewal over Two Millennia鈥� by Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li Ethnic and Racial Studies
(2022) 鈥淏i-directions and New Directions in Migration Research: Theorizing Dispossession and Power from Connie Sutton鈥檚 Work on Transnational Migration鈥� in Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton David Sutton and Deborah A. Thomas eds. Mona: University of West Indies Press.
(2022) 鈥� Desenmascarando la migraci贸n y el desarrollo. Un enfoque basado en los estudios sobre desposesi贸n y desplazamiento鈥滵ebunking migration and development. A dispossession and displacement studies approach鈥� Migraci贸n y Desarrollo
(2022) 鈥淢ultiscalar Social Relations of Dispossession and Emplacement鈥� in: Markus V. Hoehne, Echi Ch. Gabbert and John R. Eidson, eds) Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological Encounters, NY: Berghahn, pp. 308-334.
(2022) 鈥溾�橶hat鈥檚 the Difference?鈥�: Theorizing Belongings, Relationalities, and Capitalism鈥� Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2022.2149046