Seminar: Cultural Consumption as a Driver of Migrant Integration (COCUMINT)

Cultural Consumption as a driver of Migrant Integration (CUCOMINT).

The seminar aims at understanding the drivers of the consumption of cultural goods by migrants and if they play a role in the assimilation process in the destination countries.

After the first four weeks of lectures the students are expected to produce an individual or in-group survey paper supervised by the chair holder and will present their results in a discussion section which will enhance their ability to develop coherent arguments in the course of their presentations. The final research product will be part of the seminar evaluation.

The seminar aims to enable students to understand the need for an interdisciplinary knowledge of the integration of migrants. It also aims at teaching students how to do research and how to define the specific topic of research in the consumption of cultural goods, indeed a very new and challenging field. The seminar will contribute to build the abilities needed for the final dissertation. All students will write a research paper on a special local instance of consumption of cultural goods.

Here below the 2021 seminar's program:

Speakers

April 08/04/2021 - Steven Vertovec

Steven Vertovec is the Founding Director at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and Honorary Professor of Sociology and Ethnology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Previously, he was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and Director of the British Economic and Social Research Council’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). Steve’s work involves the critical examination of several concepts surrounding international migration, transnational social formations, ethnic diasporas, and contexts of urban diversity. His education includes a B.A. (Magna cum laude) in Anthropology and Religious Studies from the University of Colorado, an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. In 2018, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Social Sciences) by the Université de Liège. Steve is currently Co-Editor of the journal Global Networks and Co-Editor of the Palgrave book series “Global Diversities”. He is also the author of five books, including “Transnationalism” (Routledge, 2009) and “Diversity and Contact” (Palgrave 2016), and is Editor or Co-Editor of 35 volumes, including “Islam in Europe” (Macmillan, 1997), “Conceiving Cosmopolitanism” (Oxford University Press, 2003), “The Multicultural Backlash” (Routledge 2010), “The International Handbook of Diversity Studies” (Routledge, 2015), and “The Oxford Handbook of Super-diversity” (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). For over 25 years, Steve has engaged with a range policy-makers, including the Expert Council of German Foundations on Migration and Integration, the UK government’s Cabinet Office and Home Office, the European Commission, the G8, the World Bank, and UNESCO.

April 09/04/2021 - Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began to exhibit his work in 1955 and in 1960 he had his first solo show at Galleria Galatea in Turin. An inquiry into selfportraiture characterizes his early work. In the two-year period 1961-1962 made the first Mirror Paintings, which directly include the viewer and real time in the work, and open up perspective, reversing the Renaissance perspective that had been closed by the twentiethcentury avant-gardes. These works quickly brought Pistoletto international acclaim,leading, in the sixties, to one-man shows in important galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The Mirror Paintings are the foundation of his subsequent artistic output and theoretical thought. In 1965 and 1966 he produced a set of works entitled Minus Objects, considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement of which Pistoletto was an animating force and a protagonist. In 1967 he began to work outside traditional exhibition spaces, with the first instances of that “creative collaboration” he developed over the following decades by bringing together artists from different disciplines and diverse sectors of society. In 1975-76 he presented a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions, Le Stanze, at the Stein Gallery in Turin. This was the first of a series of complex, year-long works called “time continents”. Others are White Year (1989) and Happy Turtle (1992). In 1978, in a show in Turin, Pistoletto defined two main directions his future artwork would take: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror and Art Takes On Religion. In the early eighties he made a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, translated into marble for his solo show in 1984 at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created the series of “dark” volumes called Art of Squalor. During the nineties, with Project Art and with the creation in Biella of Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas, he brought art into active relation with diverse spheres of society with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. In 2003 he won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement. In 2004 the University of Turin awarded him a laurea honoris causa in Political Science. On that occasion the artist announced what has become the most recent phase of his work, Third Paradise. In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world. In 2010 he wrote the essay The Third Paradise, published in Italian, English, French and German. In 2012 he started promoting the Rebirth-day, first worldwide day of rebirth, celebrated every year on 21st December with initiatives taking place all around the world. In 2013 the Louvre in Paris hosted his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre. In this same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, in Tokyo. In May 2015 he received a degree honoris causa from the Universidad de las Artes of Havana in Cuba. In the same year he realizes a work of big dimensions, called Rebirth, situated in the park of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the UN. In 2017 the text written by Michelangelo Pistoletto Ominitheism and Demopraxy. Manifesto for a regeneration of society was published. Between 2018 and 2020 the activity of the Third Paradise has further intensified, in particular through the development of an international network of Embassies and Forums. In these same years he has been particularly active in various South American countries, with personal exhibitions and a series of initiatives linked to the Third Paradise.

April 14/04/2021 - Victoria Ateca-Amestoy

Victoria Ateca - Amestoy is Associate Professor in Economics at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Bilbao, Spain. She has designed and managed cultural projects, and conducts research on cultural participation, digitization and societal impact of culture. She has published research papers in Economics Bulletin, The Journal of Socio Economics, Journal of Cultural Economics, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Happiness Studies and European Journal of Operational Research, and has contributed to handbooks on social indicators, on the economics of leisure and on the economics of cultural heritage. She has also coordinated international and national research projects on the determinants of cultural participation, on cultural statistics, and on the economic and social impact of cultural projects. She has contributed to the HERITAGE-PRO design of interdisciplinary training modules for heritage professionals (https://heritagepro.eu/training-module/), to Managing Arts Projects with Societal Impact (www.mapsi.eu), and has edited a handbook on Cultural participation.

April 15/04/2021 - Tally Katz-Gerro

Tally Katz-Gerro joined the University of Manchester as Research Fellow in the Sustainable Consumption Institute and Reader in Sociology in September 2016. My research addresses scholarship conducted at the crossroads of consumption, culture, environment, and inequality, with a strong emphasis on cross-national and cross-time comparisons. Recently I served for two terms as member of the executive committee and treasurer of the European Sociological Association; I was vice-president of the Israel Sociological Society; I co-founded a section on environment and society within the Israeli Sociological Society and I was co-coordinator of the Israel branch of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI). In the past few years I was invited as visiting professor in several universities, including the Department of Economic Sociology in Turku, where I was also appointed adjunct professor; Kyung-Hee University in Seoul; Science Po in Paris; ENSAE in Paris; University of Innsbruck and others. I was recently appointed as co-editor-in-chief of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media, and the Arts.

April 16/04/2021 - Yudhishthir Raj Isar

Yudhishthir Raj Isar’s professional life has straddled various domains of cultural theory and practice, notably cultural policy. He is currently Education Director at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. An international civil servant at UNESCO from 1973 to 2002, Isar was notably Director of the International Fund for the Promotion of Culture, Executive Secretary of the World Commission on Culture and Development and Director of Cultural Policies for Development. As regards his academic life since 2002, Isar is Emeritus Professor at The American University of Paris, where he was Professor of Cultural Policy Studies from 2002 to 2018. In 2018-19, he was a Distinguished Scholar at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence, Italy and Visiting Professor with the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University, India.‘Eminent Research Visitor’ at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University (2011-2013) and Visiting Adjunct Professor (2014-2016). Earlier, he was Maître de conférence at the Institut d’Études Politiques, Paris (2005-2010). Isar was also the founding co-editor of the 5-volume Cultures and Globalization Series, published by SAGE (2007 to 2012). He was the lead writer for the United Nations Creative Economy Report 2013. Widening Local Development Pathways and edited UNESCO’s reports (2015 and 2018) on the implementation of the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions entitled Re|Shaping Cultural Policies. In 2013- 14 he was team leader of the European Union’s inquiry on ‘Culture in EU External Relations’, and the principal author of its 2014 report Engaging the World: Towards Global Cultural Citizenship.In 2004-2008, he served as president of the European arts and culture platform Culture Action Europe and has been a board member of several cultural organizations. Born in India, educated in India and France in the fields of economics, sociology and cultural anthropology, Isar is a French citizen and lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

April 21/04/2021 - Marco Martiniello

Marco Martiniello (born October 15, 1960) is an Italian-Belgian sociologist and political scientist. He teaches sociology of migration and ethnic relations at the University of Liège. He is currently research director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), and the director of the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM), as well as Vice-Dean for Research at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Liège. Martiniello holds a B.A. in sociology from the University of Liège and a Ph.D. in social and political sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. He specializes in migration studies, ethnicity, multiculturalism, racism and citizenship in the European Union and in Belgium, and he is the author, editor or co-editor of numerous articles, book chapters, reports and books on these themes. His current research focuses on the integration, political participation and mobilization of immigrant minorities through the arts in super-diverse cities across the world (Belgium, Italy, South Africa, Australia and USA). Along his career, Martiniello has held numerous visiting appointments at New York University, Columbia University, Malmö University, City University of New York, University of Geneva,University of Kwazulu-Natal, University of Queensland, etc. Besides academic achievements, Martiniello was also awarded with important civic distinctions including the honorary citizenship of the city of Liège in 2015, and the knighthood of the Order of the Star of Italy in 2017.

April 22/04/2021 - Wiebke Sievers

Wiebke Sievers is migration researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna as well as guest-researcher and lecturer at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. Her research concentrates on migration and culture in Austria and in international comparison, with her main interest being in literature. However, she also works on theatre, cultural policies and the financing of culture. Her other research foci include literary translation and the internationalisation of literature. She is a member of the Executive Board of the largest research network in the field of migration studies IMISCOE and directs together with Marco Martiniello the IMISCOE Standing Committee DIVCULT (Superdiversity, Migration and Cultural Change). Recent publications "Scale Shifting: New Insights into Global Literary Circulation", Special issue of the Journal of World Literature (2020, with Peggy Levitt); "From Monolingualism to Multilingualism? The Pre- and Post-monolingual Condition in the Austrian Literary Field", in Austria in Transit: Displacement and the Nation-State, ed. by Áine McMurtry and Deborah Holmes (Austrian Studies, 26) 2019, 40-56. "Immigrant and ethnic minority writers since 1945: fourteen national contexts in Europe and beyond" (2018, with Sandra Vlasta). Diversity incorporation in the cultural policy mainstream: Exploring the main frameworks and approaches bridging cultural and migration studies, Special issue of the journal Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 8, 1, 2017 (with Marco Martiniello and Ricard Zapata-Barrero) “Mainstage theatre and immigration: The long history of exclusion and recent attempts at diversification in Berlin and Vienna”, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 8, 1, 2017, 67-83.

April 28/04/2021 - Alessandra Venturini

Alessandra Venturini is Full Professor of Political Economy at the University of Torino, where she holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Migration Studies (www.europeanmigrationstudiescjm.unito.it) and directs the Interdisciplinary Diploma in Migration Studies (www.diplomamigrationstudies.unito.it). From 2004-2011 she was Deputy Director of the CARIM project at the European University Institute (EUI) and from 2012-2017 founder and Deputy Director of the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) at the EUI in Florence. She studied Economics at the University of Florence and got her Ph.D. in Economics from the European University Institute in 1982. She was visiting professor at Brown University, the Institute of Development Studies (Sussex University), and the International Institute of Labour Studies at the ILO in Geneva. She has collaborated with the OECD migration section, the European Commission Migration Program, CEPR Migration Research program, IOM, MPI and the World Bank. She is a fellow at the IZA, CHILD, FIERI, and a member of DIVCULT-IMISCOE executive board. Her research interests are in Labour Economics, notably the migration choice and its impact on the innovation process of the destination country, the integration of foreigners in the labour market and the supporting role of cultural consumption, the effect of remittances and high-skilled migration in the sending countries. European Commission expert on migration, she is co chair of the G-20 Migration task force. https://sites.google.com/site/venturinimigration/

April 29/04/2021 - Andrea Ricci

Andrea Ricci is a graduate student in International Sciences at the University of Turin. He is interested in the governance of migration and multi-level governance. His research focuses on the impact of migration governance on immigrants integration and the facilitation that could occur if the implementation of integration practices follow innovative ways of development. He is the tutor for the Economics of Migration in Europe (ECOMEUR) course of the "European Migration Studies" Jean Monnet Chair. Currently, he is working on the 'Coro BAC project': he will draft a literature review aimed at grounding the project basis on solid scientific findings. The "BAC Choir" will explore women's creativity through singing and theatre, providing an opportunity to meet with women of different cultures and languages, promoting their wellbeing and vocal talents. This paper draws particular attention to group singing and chorus's capacity to develop soft skills that foreigners can spend in the destination country's labour market.

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