Punjab’s migrants take less home By Geeta Pandey, BBC
BBC News, Jalandhar, Punjab state
Pyara Singh is on his annual visit home from Hamburg, Germany, where he works as a cook in a pizzeria.
He has been away for 14 years, but his parents, wife and two children live in Giljian, a village in the Jalandhar district of India’s northern state of Punjab.
“I have two acres of land, but that isn’t enough to support the whole family. So I migrated to Germany. As a cook, I make six euros ($8) an hour,” he says.
Pyara Singh now only gets four or five hours of work a day
Mr Singh lives cheaply – he shares a small apartment with several other workers from Punjab and eats frugally, which allows him to save most of his earnings.
His annual visits are eagerly looked forward to by his family – when he comes, he brings his year’s savings, which help the family live more comfortably for the rest of the year.
His savings have helped the family build a new two-storey house where he sits and chats now. With several bedrooms, a drawing room, a lounge and a courtyard, the house is spacious and accommodating.
But Mr Singh is a worried man now – the economic recession in Germany has made the going tough for him.
To read the full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7780040.stm
“Changing Societies – Values, Religions, and Education” June 9-13, 2009
At present societal changes take place in societies worldwide. As a result of this, issues related to value changes surface. Issues related to democracy, to identities, cultures and ethnicity are brought to the fore. Through migration, the patterns of religious activities are also changing. The presence of citizens with more varied religious affiliations, some with new understandings of the role that religions play in society, poses new questions to respond to. Gender relations are another societal area where changes are taking place. The roles of women and men – or girls and boys – and equity between them have become crucial issues and are nowadays complexly interwoven with the others mentioned above.
The societal changes mentioned above strongly influence life in schools and hence have repercussions on teacher education and higher learning institutions, as well as other societal institutions such as churches etc. A common feature of all these changes at the centre of institutions that have to deal with them is the need to handle diversity and difference.
In this conference our purpose is to elucidate these issues by assembling researchers in the field and presenting recent research through internationally renowned speakers. In doing this we hope to contribute to the development of excellence in research. To address the issues, different academic disciplines are needed. For this reason the speakers are from different disciplines and we welcome a multidisciplinary encounter. As the theme indicates, an educational interest is a meeting point. Once again, welcome everybody with a research interest in these issues! Bring you own contribution to this context.
For further details see: http://www.umea-congress.se/changing2009/index.html
Comments Off
Visualising Migration and Divided Societies
Deadline 9th January 2009
Conference: ‘Visualizing Migration and Divided Societies’ Organizers:
Susan Ball (University of Paris 8) Chris Gilligan (University of the West of Scotland)
Hosted by the MSH Paris Nord 5th June 2009
Supported by: EA1569 Transferts critiques et dynamiques des saviors (domaine anglophone), and the University of Paris 8.
Contemporary society is often characterised as being marked by unprecedented levels of movement of people, goods and information (as articulated, for example, in discussions of globalisation, information society or liquid modernity). A related theme is that of barriers and division (as articulated, for example, in concerns about residential segregation, social exclusion or immigration controls).
This conference’s focus on migration and divided society brings these two themes together in a single framework, and shifts the method of their analysis from concepts which have been predominantly language-based and/or number-based to the visual medium. In the conference we want to bring social scientists (sociologists, geographers, historians, anthropologists, researchers in urban and development studies, etc.) together with practitioners who are employed primarily in a visual medium (photography, audiovisual material, new media, museum scenography, thematic cartography, etc.) in order to generate synergies between the different fields. By giving primacy to methods of visual study we hope to enable researchers trained in the social sciences to experience the social world through additional analytical lenses, and to develop a critical dialogue between the disciplines that will further our understanding of the core concepts: ‘migration’ and ‘divided society’.
We are interested in papers that address migration in one of a variety of different forms. These include migration as: immigration, emigration, ‘white flight’, return migration, temporary migration (students and business travellers) rural to urban migration, transnational movements, internal movements, etc. It follows on that we are also interested in papers which address different types of migrants: economic migrants, labour migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, cultural migrants, etc.
Theoretical, methodological and empirical papers are welcome. A title and an abstract (around 300 words) will be sufficient for submission, by 9th January 2009.
Please direct all enquiries and abstracts to Susan Ball (s.ball@wanadoo.fr) or Chris Gilligan (chris.gilligan@yahoo.co.uk)
Comments Off
Migrations & Identities – A journal of people and ideas in motion
The title migrations & identities represents a programme: We aim to interrogate notions of ‘identity’ while asking how the fact of mobility and displacement does shape understandings of self and the wider world, among both migrants and ‘host’ societies. By the same token, we seek to understand how ideas and concepts are transformed as they ‘migrate’ from one place and culture to another. These issues have been, and continue to be, addressed under a number of rubrics and through a number of approaches in the humanities and social sciences. In acknowledgement of this, migrations & identities is multi- and interdisciplinary in its conception and management. It also aims to cover the widest possible range of places, periods and methods, subject only to a shared curiosity and enthusiasm about the possibilities of working at the interface between the investigation of the material conditions of migration processes and the study of ideas and subjectivities. In particular, we hope that scholars working in many fields will find in migrations & identities a forum for discussion of the methods appropriate to a project of linking observable experience and mentalities in different times and places, and that among the topics of discussion will be the real challenges involved in conversing across disciplinary boundaries.
We invite manuscripts from scholars representing all disciplines and methodologies which can contribute to this discussion. These might include case studies based on empirical research which are framed by and reflect on the methodological and theoretical issues set out above, essays which focus on questions of theory and methodology, or review articles. The journal will be published twice a year.
Comments Off
leave a comment