Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
In the world’s leading city of immigration, in a time of a troubling resurgence of anti-migrant action and rhetoric, in a University with a faculty and student body committed to social justice, the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, homed at The New School for Social Research, supports critical and applied scholarship and provides opportunities for social action and policy engagement for faculty, students and the broader University community.
The Institute’s program fosters concentric circles of scholarship and action—in our University, our city, and the world. The Institute contributes to the University community by offering additional courses, sponsoring lectures and events, and supporting extended visits of leading scholars. The Zolberg Institute engages deeply with New York City, supporting student work with the wide range of groups and communities in the City.
The term “mobility” in the Institute’s name is the key to its mission. It commits the Institute to a dynamic understanding of concepts central to the field of migration studies—borders, citizenship and other forms of membership, the nation-state, forced migration, migration due to climate change and disasters. It also opens the Institute up for examination of the prevailing political, cultural and economic narratives that both influence and are influenced by scholarship, policy and social action. It is a time for serious scrutiny of the premises, categories and policies that have produced the current historical moment, and for imagining new approaches to understanding human mobility (and immobility).
Featured Profile: Alex Aleinikoff
Aleinikoff has written widely in the areas of immigration and refugee law and policy, transnational law, citizenship, race, and constitutional law. He is currently at work on a book tentatively titled The Arc of Protection: Reforming the International Refugee Regime. His book Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship was published by Harvard University Press in 2002. Alex is a co-author of leading legal casebooks on immigration law and forced migration.
Before coming to The New School, Alex served as United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees (2010-15) and was a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where he also served as dean and Executive Vice President of Georgetown University. He was co-chair of the Immigration Task Force for President Barack Obama’s transition team in 2008. From 1994 to 1997, he served as the general counsel, and then executive associate commissioner for programs, at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Alex was inducted into the American Academy of Arts of Sciences in 2014.
Featured Project: Forced Migration Forum
The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility is home to the Forced Migration Forum—a platform for discussion of topics relating to forced migration from all academic fields and policy perspectives. The Forum has several aims: to provide a place for debate on the core assumptions and concepts of our field; to encourage researchers to post and discuss their work (and spark a discussion about the research findings and their relevance); and to serve a “translation” function, bringing research to policy-thinkers and makers in a way that is useful to them.
Source: Forced Migration Forum