A one-day workshop-conference entitled ‘At the Borders of Identity: Forces of Cohesion and Division in European Migration at Local, National and European Levels’ will be hosted by the University of Malta’s anthropological sciences and international relations departments and the Organisation for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD) on October 15.

Migration to Europe is more than a challenge to physical capacities, political or economic systems, or policy infrastructures that have been built to manage migration in the past. Migration has always challenged, and will increasingly threaten, the established ‘borders of identity’ that have been built to contain ideas about who ‘we’ are.

The workshop aims to combine academic, practitioner and governmental perspectives to uncover how, under the influence of migration, identities can shift to challenge, sometimes divide, and at other times reconstellate European peoples’ sense of who ‘we’ are, as well as who ‘others’ are.

Divisions occur, for instance, at the point of entry into the EU, as ‘non-Europeans’ pose new challenges to different concepts of identity: those based on locality, on national citizenship (with all its attendant comfortable cultural baggage), and on ‘European Values’.

Migrations can thus severely challenge different, and sometimes competing, senses of identity, posing new identity, ethical and political dilemmas and redefinitions for the self and others, affecting both hosts and migrants.

Current events in Europe raise further questions not just about the immediate responses to humanitarian crises (and how they are presented, worked out, and ‘managed’ by the different political actors, including national states, the EU, civil society, the media, and populist movements), but also about the courses of action European citizens and their political representatives, have engaged in, and, in some cases, the active and/or passive inaction that has led to such massive, historically unprecedented, population movements.

The current migration crisis in Europe is thus not merely a matter of the working out of immediate responses on a political and civil society level, but also a matter of geo-political, cultural, and temporal horizons about the nature of European, national, and local community engagement within its borders and beyond them.

Incoming migrants are seen to challenge current EU arrangements and practices, national borders and capacities for national, social, and economic integration. There is also an increasing awareness that borders of ethnicities, religions and cultures are becoming porous. Against this background, how will ‘European’, ‘national’, and local identities be worked out?

Besides seeking to understand the crucial forces of division, the conference also sets out to gain an insight into the opportunities for cohesion that migration brings. If this challenge to the borders of identity can be met with a strategic approach to engaging and expanding the cultural, national, and European symbols and ideas that people use to provide ‘identity’ for themselves, this could result in a more powerfully integrated EU, with more diversity-embracing national and regional entities.

At the workshop there will be a number of key speakers in the morning to set the parameters of the debate, plus discussion. The afternoon sessions will have shorter presentations, presenting different facets of the migration crises in Europe at local, national and European levels from various perspectives. As this is a workshop designed to encourage debate and exploration there will be ample time for discussion of the issues, insights, and perspectives raised.

Speakers and participants in­clude Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart from the University of Pittsburgh, Bruce While from Doshisha University, Japan, and OICD, Wayne Jordash from OICD, Paul Sant Cassia, Carmen Sammut, Paul Clough, David Zammit and Ranier Fsadni from the University. There will also be researchers, diplomats and policymakers, from various European countries and the EU, and representatives of NGOs.

The workshop will be held from 10am to 5pm at the Sir Jack Goody Library at the University’s Valletta campus, St Paul Street, Valletta.

It is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students free of charge. Non-students will be asked for a €10 contribution. Registration will be at the door, but those intending to participate are asked to register their interest by e-mailing annelise.calleja@um.edu.mt.

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