Englandesh project

Here’s Sam Strickland’s fascinating photography project about migration from Sylhet to the UK.

http://www.engladesh.com/

Please click on the image to find out more about the contribution of the Irish to the British construction industry.

Inter-sections June Theme: World Refugee Day – Refugee Week 2007

Deadline for your essays, ideas, visuals and comments: 6 July 2007

Email your submissions to intersectionsblog@gmail.com

Thanks to everyone who submitted essays, projects and even a video (!) for our Food and Migrating Cultures theme. We got a small wave of things right at the deadline, so please take a look if you haven’t seen them yet. In recognition of World Refugee Day , and the numerous activities taking place in the UK, and elsewhere in honor of it, we decided to join the effort. This month, from now until 6 July 2007, we are soliciting your contributions, including your reflections, works in progress, original photography, video and audio having to do with Refugees.

Refugee Week Promotional Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU0aaoqZ0EA

We particularly welcome any reactions to some of the events listed above (please follow the web links), as part of our effort to provide a forum for public commentary on migration. Don’t forget that we also invite your comments on previous posts on the blog. A lot of our authors are eager to know what kind of reactions their work provokes.

Looking forward to hearing from you,
The Editorial Team at intersections.wordpress.com

Jewish consumption and material culture in the early modern period

Call to advanced graduate students to participate in a workshop   ”Jewish Consumption and Material Culture in the Early Modern Period”
Location:     Connecticut, United States

Advanced Graduate students are invited to apply to participate in the fourth annual Early Modern Workshop in Jewish History, tentatively entitled “Jewish Consumption and Material Culture in the Early Modern Period,” which will take place at the University of Maryland at College Park beginning on the evening of Sunday, August 19, 2007 and will conclude on Tuesday evening on August 22, 2006.
The topic of material culture within Jewish historiography has only been explored in the context of ancient Jewish history.
Unlike early modern European history, or early American history, both of which have been studied from the perspective of material culture and consumption, Jewish history has been predominantly based on texts.  Scholars of early modern Jewish history have tended to see the minhagim (customs) and responsa literatures as a particularly valuable source of
information about daily life, but have tended to focus on specific data rather than to explore the significance of Jewish material culture. There are of course well known sources such as memoirs (see the recently published edition of Gluckel of Hameln’s memoir by Chava Turniansky), travel accounts, and the ”ethnographic” descriptions of non-Jewish observers such as the Buxtorfs  (father and son) and converts from Judaism such as Samuel Nahmias (Giulio Morosini, Via della Fede). It is only recently that questions of the transformation of Jewish culture through consumption and material  culture have been raised, by scholars such as  Elliott Horowitz, Zeev Gris,  Shifra Baruchson, Shalom Sabar, or in art history Vivian Mann and Richard Cohen. 

Once a week: Sadza and muriwo

 by Nick James

Once a week we have Sadza and muriwo.
We are not Zimbabwean; more English and Welsh.
Sadza is a maize-meal (polenta-like) dish and muriwo is any relish to accompany it. we have greens (cabbage) cooked with onions and tomato with a little peanut added at the end (like a Satay).
All the children eat this and we talk about Africa. While in Africa our favorite meal that we cannot eat now was potatoes and tomato, simple as that.
People laughed at us lots for eating Sadza. In one hospital canteen the staff cringed when they saw me. They whispered in Shona that they didn’t have any rice. I said I loved Sadza so the whole room stared at me! Food security, food culture and preparation are all very important in Africa. The assumption that people merely eat to live is false. English people often place a qualitative burden on eating. They don’t seem to enjoy it except in the greedy sense. Sorry to generalise; I know that there’s lots of Observer colour suppliments trying to show otherwise.

Questions, questions

From Indira:
Just a quick clarification: Is this blog restricted to topics concerning the UK/ Europe, or is there scope for participation from the US and beyond?

-No! We welcome submissions from anywhere and about everywhere.

ECREA Diaspora, Migration and the Media, European Workshop

Mediations of Cultural Difference: Debating Media and Diversity

7 and 8 September 2007
University of Leeds

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Marie Gillespie, Open University
Charles Husband, Bradford University
Kim Knott, Leeds University; Director of AHRC ‘Diasporas, Migration andIdentities’ programme

The necessity to have an ongoing debate on the ‘political imaginary of heterogeneity’ (Werbner, 2002: 276) is revealed in the face-to-face encounters in the streets of today’s metropoles, the mediated urban, national and transnational encounters within and beyond European cultural scapes, as well as in the mediated political actions and reactions around diversity and its implications. It is this articulation of the debate around cultural difference, communication, and the media that is the prime focus of this workshop. How might we view the media role in this discussion? And what about other forms of communicative practices that may feed into the debate? Who participates in the debate and what form does this participation take? Do the (new) media lead in new forms of identities, subjectivities and solidarities? Conversely, do they lead to new forms of exclusion and conformism, and to new fundamentalisms?

Call for Papers

1st Global Conference: Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging

Monday 3rd September – Wednesday 5th September 2007
Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers
This inter- and multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the new and prominent place that the idea of culture has for the construction of identity and the implications of this for social membership in contemporary societies. In particular the project will also assess the larger context of major world transformations, for example, new forms of migration and the
massive movements of people across the globe, as well as the impact and contribution of globalisation on tensions, conflicts and the sense of rootedness and belonging. Looking to encourage innovative trans-disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it means for people, the world over, to forge identities in rapidly changing national, social and cultural
contexts.

One of the Reasons for Being: Editor Lauren Wagner

The idea for this blog trickled in little by little. We four editors met at a conference in Leeds last December, along with a group of other postgrads interested in migration. One of the goals of this conference was to expand our methodological perspectives; we attended group seminars on the use of visual artifacts in social sciences, we listened to the experiences of fellow students who had tried other methods, we endeavored to absorb what we could and figure out how it might apply to our own projects.

To me, this question of ‘other methods’ has been a persistent one, from the beginning of my academic career. I am not a writing person, I am a Film Person. I prefer demonstrating what I’m talking about through editing images, not words.  I firmly believe that a message can reach more people, and get across more effectively and more memorably, if you take it out of the written form.  When looking for ways to communicate my ideas, especially so that they reach someone other than the same circuitous academic public, I come up to a black hole.

Hence: Inter-sections.  My biggest hope for this blog is that we will see as many visual/video/audio submissions as written ones.  I’d like to believe there are others out there who have an itch to see things off paper and on-screen, even if it’s a small one.  As we gain increasingly easy access to more kinds of technology, and what’s more the means of sharing ideas through technology, what can we do but try to take advantage?

Looking forward to your submissions,

Lauren

Europe: Development through Migration and Integration at UNESCO Paris

10 May 2007, UNESCO Paris
About 185-192 million of men and women are “on the move”, searching for a better life far away from their home countries. These enormous migration flows present a challenge to politics and society. How can this challenge be best addressed? This is a crucial topic for Europe today and will be the decisive one for its future.