Lecture with Ash Amin: Looking Beyond Xenophobic Nationalism

Det här evenemanget hålls på engelska.

Join the event with this link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65269184490

This is not a good time to be an immigrant, refugee or minority in Europe. After a decade of austerity, and a longer period of growing inequality and welfare austerity, majority discontent is finding cause against these figures. Seduced by the inflammatory language of nativist nationalism promising the closed polity without interfering germs, migrants, and other ‘anywheres’, vast swathes of the ‘left behind’ are seeing salvation in the return of homely nation, policed by a protectionist state and entrusted to the indigenous community. They are persuaded that the elimination of the foreign is a condition of preserving self and historic community.

An indicator of this is the absence of any need to prove that the ‘foreign’ - kept conveniently flexible to cover, when it suits, immigration, cultural pluralism, European membership, liberalism, experts and elites – is the true source of national problems such as austerity and inequality, social and regional alienation, and existential crisis.

Professor Amin is known for his work in urban, cultural and economic geography. He writes about cities and regions as relationally constituted; globalisation as everyday process; the economy as cultural entity; race and multiculture at the intersection of biopolitics and vernacular practices, slums and dwelling practices, and the changing meanings of Europe. He has held Fellowships and Visiting Professorships at a number of European Universities. He has been founding co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy, and is on the advisory board of a number of international journals. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences, and also Foreign Member of the Italian Academia Nazionale Dei Lincei. He holds an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and was Foreign Secretary of the British Academy from 2015 to 2019. He was awarded a CBE in 2014 for his contributions to social science. He has been awarded the 2021 Olof Palme Visiting Professorship by the Swedish Research Council, to be held at Uppsala University during 2021.

This event is organised in connection with this conference, held the same day.