Pathways of Cosmopolitanism: London and Manchester?
Monday 23 November 2009, 12-3pm
Hanson Room, Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
The University of Manchester
Speaker: Adrian Favell (UCLA)
Paper: The Cosmopolitan and the Provincial: London (and Manchester) as a Hub of Intra-EU Mobility
Sponsors: CRESC, RICC, and the Pathways to Cosmopolitan Research programme.
Abstract: Despite a deluge of speculative social theory concerning new forms of mobility, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism in Europe, there is a lack of in depth empirical research on the actual and lives and experiences of the most prototypically mobile of Europeans: the new generation of mobile European citizens enjoying ever expanding free movement rights within the EU. Drawing on two recently published books, Eurostars and Eurocities – an ethnography of EU citizens living in London, Brussels, Amsterdam – and Pioneers of European Integration – the first systematic sociological survey of the impact of intra-EU migration – I will focus on the phenomenology of European mobility as expressed by mobile Europeans in the most successful Eurocity of all, London. Behind the cosmopolitan allure of this hub city, lie traces of national provincialism and residual barriers to even the most privileged of migrants in the city, that point to why intra-European migration remains a statistically marginal option in the lives of middle class Europeans. The discussion will then be extended to Manchester, a city that has enjoyed some of the same attraction to international migrants as London during the boom years of 1995-2008.
Biography:
Adrian Favell is Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and Professor of European and International Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of various works on multiculturalism, migration, cosmopolitanism and cities, including Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (1998), The Human Face of Global Mobility (with Michael Peter Smith, 2006), and Pioneers of European Integration: Citizenship and Mobility in the EU (with Ettore Recchi, 2009). In his recently published ethnography, Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe (Blackwell, 2008), he documents the lives and experiences of the new generation of mobile European citizens living in the cities of London, Brussels and Amsterdam. He is currently writing a book about Japanese contemporary art and society since the 1990s. For further details see his website.
To attend: Please RSVP to Darien.Rozentals@manchester.ac.uk by 11 November 2009.