Workshop

The Early Modern Migration Reading Group invites researchers to contribute to our workshop. Our workshop aims to investigate the categorisation of migrants into a dichotomy of good/bad in history, in order to develop more relevant and nuanced ways to investigate, think about, and communicate early modern migration. Part of this investigation involves understanding how historic migrations inform debates about contemporary migration. Undertaking this work requires a commitment to interdisciplinarity and working with those with lived experience.

This workshop will bring together researchers at all stages of their careers. Our keynote speaker is Lucy Mayblin, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Sheffield, and author of Asylum After Empire: Postcolonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (2017). We will also be hearing from practitioners in the asylum/migration field, and participants will be asked to participate in the following workshops - details about any preparatory reading will be circulated prior to the workshop.

Defining the migrant and the refugee

• Focusing on definitions of the migrant(s) in law, policy, and other contexts, with reference to historical definitions.

• How discourse impacts on both defining groups and how these definitions are understood and used.

• The problems (and possibilities) of using these terms in historical investigations.

Race/class/gender and the migrant and the refugee

• How do the concepts of race and/or class and/or gender complicate our definitions of the refugee/migrant?

• How can interdisciplinarity enrich or complicate historical investigations of migration and mobility?

If you would be interested in participating in the workshop please sign up here. 

Lunch and refreshments will be provided, and we may be able to provide a travel bursary. We are also open to people attending remotely, although their participation in discussions may be limited due to technical issues.

We hope that the findings of this workshop will be written up for publication in a journal or blog, and any facilitators will be supported to engage in this.

This event is funded by the Royal Historical Society as part of its RHS Workshops programme, 2023. The annual scheme provides funding for historians to meet together to work collaboratively, and in detail, on a range of activities -- such as research projects, testing of research ideas, planning for grant bids, networking or other discussions necessary for academic work. The organisers are very grateful to the Royal Historical Society for funding this workshop. For more on the Society's workshop programmes 2023-24 see: https://royalhistsoc.org/research_funding/workshop-grants/ 

The Early Modern Migration Reading Group is a collective of PGR and ECR historians engaging critically with the historiography of early modern migration. We seek to understand - and challenge - the ways early modern migration is written about and used to construct narratives both in early modernity and for our contemporary context.