This years Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting in Los Angeles (March 30-April 2, 2023) has a wonderful program including several panels solicited by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society! Here are a list of IEHS panels to check out (the full OAH program can be found here).
Thursday, March 30
New Directions in Middle Eastern and South Asian Immigration Histories: A Roundtable Discussion (11:00am-12:30pm)
This roundtable conversation convenes scholars working in Middle Eastern and South Asian immigration studies, two fields that simultaneously experience working as “a part of” and “apart from” Asian American studies. Panelists discuss the contours and challenges of working in Middle Eastern and South Asian immigration studies now, with attention to issues of racialization; class formation; border control; immigration restriction and mounting xenophobia in the United States. Participants will also query epistemological convergences between the two fields and draw attention to how transnational ME/SA histories intersect with U.S. immigration and ethnic histories.
Chair and Commentator: Stacy Fahrenthold, University of California, Davis
Panelists:
Neama Alamri, California State University, Fresno
Hardeep Dhillon, American Bar Foundation
Sarah Gualtieri, University of Southern California
Uzma Quraishi, Sam Houston State University
New Directions in Migration and Citizenship
(12:45pm-2:15pm)
This roundtable will provide a wide ranging and critical examination of recent and emerging scholarship on the history of migration and citizenship, with its broad chronological and methodological coverage, it will feature some of the most innovative recent work by scholars working on migration and citizenship today.
Chair: Kevin Kenny, New York University
Panelists:
Delia Fernández-Jones, Michigan State University
Amanda Frost, Immigration and Citizenship
Hana Maruyama, University of Connecticut
Karla McKanders, Vanderbilt University Law School
Friday March 31
Beyond “Boat People”: New Directions in Haitian Immigration History (1:30pm-3:00pm)
This roundtable aims to explore new approaches to the history of Haitian immigration in the late twentieth century. Tragic depictions of Haitian asylum seekers saturated the media in the 1980s and early 1990s, highlighting the “desperation” of Haitian “boat people” fleeing the Duvalier dictatorships and the military regimes that followed. The injustice of U.S. efforts to exclude and incarcerate Haitians merits recounting, but many of the narratives used to portray Haitians in the late twentieth century were dehumanizing and demeaning. The scholars in this panel are working to reassess this important history by foregrounding transnational, comparative, and activist focused methodologies.
Chair and Commentator: Jeffrey Kahn, University of California, Davis
Panelists:
Llana Barber, State University of New York College at Old Westbury
Monika Gosin, College of William & Mary
Ayanna Legros, Duke University
Carl Lindskoog, Raritan Valley Community College
Saturday, April 1
Teaching Migration and Ethnic History: Content, Audiences, and Creative Pedagogies (8:30am-10:30am)
“Teaching Migration and Ethnic History” is a two-hour pedagogy workshop organized into three parts: an introduction to creative pedagogies for teaching migration and ethnic history; breakout sessions for workshopping these pedagogies into existing curriculum; and an open discussion exploring what it means to teach migrant and ethnic history.
Panelist:
Natalie Mendoza, University of Colorado Boulder
Andrew Urban, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Community Organizing across Borders: How Local Advocates and Officials Aided and Policed Latinx Migrants during Twentieth-Century Moments of “Crisis” (10:30am-12:00pm)
Chair and Commentator: Lora Key, Journal of Arizona History
Panelist:
An Alternative to Legal Belonging? Debating Responsibility for Migrant Youth and Piloting an Inclusive Welfare State at Mid-Century, Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, University of Illinois Chicago
Policing “Our” Delinquents: Community Outreach as Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Policy in Mid-Century San Diego , Doris Morgan Rueda, Stanford Law School
Sanctuary Universities: California Campuses and Student Organizing in the Mid-1980s , Nathan Ellstrand, Independent Historian
Climate Change, Refuge, and Migration Policy in the Americas: A Roundtable on Maria Cristina Garcia’s Book State of Disaster (10:30am-12:00pm)
What policies should the United States adopt in response to the growing number of climate refugees? Maria Cristina Garcia takes up this question in her urgent new book State of Disaster: The Failure of U.S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (2022). She examines recent U.S. responses to environmental disasters in Central America and the Caribbean to see what lessons might be learned for shaping humanitarian and immigration policies in an era of accelerating climate change. A diverse group of scholars will assess Garcia’s contributions to our understanding of some of today’s most pressing environmental and political issues.
Chair: Julio Capó, Florida International University
Panelists:
Adam Goodman, University of Illinois Chicago
Kimberly Beaudreau, University of Illinois Chicago
Maria Cristina Garcia, Cornell University
Laura Briggs, University of Massachusetts Amherst