Temporariness, circularity, mobility: internal migration and social citizenship in Europe and China

Workshop organised by the Department of Political Science on Friday, 2 December at NIAS. The workshop is open to interested scholars.

Background

The influence of various forms of migration on national welfare regimes and social citizenship has attracted increasing scholarly attention. While the European Union and China are of different nature in terms of political organization and geographical scale, both are characterized by multi-dimensional processes of internal border-opening that encourage labour migration and pressure to restructure social citizenship, which has been unevenly developed within the framework of the nation-state in Europe and unevenly regulated at the municipal level in China. Building on previous comparative studies from different perspectives, this inter-disciplinary workshop brings together researchers from political science, sociology, human geography and law to examine the challenges for social citizenship under conditions of increased cross-border mobility in these areas from a global perspective. Specifically, it focuses on the continued production of temporariness and precarity in mobility regimes that have removed formal barriers to free movement, and examines how this challenges the existing configuration of welfare institutions and social rights. Approaching these pressing issues in the global context of the precarization of temporary and informal labour migrants, the agenda of this workshop is not only relevant for Europe and China, but also for other Asian countries profoundly influenced by both transnational and internal migration.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Danish Research Council (DFF) and the Asian Dynamics Initiative (ADI).