Translations of Migration

The Translations of Migration working conference is dedicated to a critical assessment of the way concepts representing migration are translated across different cultural contexts. In using translation as an analytic, the aim is to examine the ways migration is and has been culturally coded across time, space, language, and academic discipline. Our emphasis is on the practices of translation as well as the roles of different actors in the making of meaning relating to migration and mobility in a variety of spatial and chronological contexts.

This conference, to be held October 20-21, 2023 at the Simpson Center, not only explores the possibilities that “translation” offers to migration studies but also relocates agency and deconstructs structural apparatuses that ascribe cultural meanings to people read as migrants and processes known as mobility. This approach prioritizes the importance of historicizing the particular ways in which translation has been understood and practiced and the larger economic, political, and social contexts in which translation as acts of articulation occur.  Speakers include Kirsten Silva Gruesz (University of California, Santa Cruz), Anand Yang (University of Washington), Lok Siu (University of California, Berkeley), Laura Bieger (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), Catherine S. Ramirez (University of California, Santa Cruz), Julie Weise (University of Oregon, Eugene), Fredy González (University of Illinois, Chicago), Christoph Rass (Osnabrück University), and Peter Schneck (Osnabrück University).