Rike Sitas

ACC is excited to host Prof Faranak Miraftab in the first of our academic Seminar Series for 2015. In this seminar 'Transnational Labor and Place Making in the Rustbelt US: Implications for Theorizing Place  and Politics of Place in the Global Era', Prof Miraftab will be presenting from her forthcoming book (2016) entitled Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility. Abstract As a point observation I take an industrial town in rural rustbelt of the United States, and study the rapid social transformation of this space due to transnational labor recruitment by the meat processing industry. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Illinois, Mexico and Togo, I unfold the global production and social reproduction of migrant workers; how they make place globally and locally; and how they renegotiate inter-racial relations to make a former sundown town their new home in Illinois. Focusing on an often overlooked space in urban scholarship of globalization and taken-for-granted processes of global labor mobility, this study recovers voices and stories often hidden, made invisible or left out of the picture, to theorize place and place making relationally and stress the difference that place makes. Spanning urban studies, human geography, immigration and transitional studies, Making a Home in the Heartland makes important intervention in the theorization of urban, production and social reproduction of transnational migrants, politics of place and place making. Biography Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A native of Iran, she did her undergraduate studies at the Tehran University; while in political asylum she earned her Master's degree in Norway and later moved to the US and completed her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary ethnographic work crosses planning, geography and transnational studies and is empirically based in cities of Latin America, Africa and North America. As an urban scholar of globalization she is interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens' struggles to access dignified livelihood. She was named as a 2014-15 University Scholar, a prestigious award bestowed on faculty at the University of Illinois campuses. Her most recent and forthcoming publications include Cities of the Global South Reader (Miraftab and Kudva, Routledge 2014); Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World (eds. Miraftab, Wilson and Salo, Routledge April 2015), and Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility (Miraftab, Indiana University Press, January 2016). Her presentation will draw on the latter, a multi-sited ethnography concerning global production and social reproduction of migrant labor and how this makes for local development in the heartland US.  

In this seminar, Dr Chloé Buire will be presenting a paper entitled 'Performing a New Model of Active and Activist Citizenship in South Africa'. Abstract In 2014, South Africa celebrated its “Twenty Years of Democracy”. Official commemorations emphasized the pride in belonging to the Rainbow Nation, but commentators recalled the fragility of the national myth.  Many of these commentators feared that young people who have not lived under apartheid could endanger democracy because of their unstable and conflicting political identities.  In this context, this paper explores the kind of citizenship promoted in youth policies and curricula, and traces how citizenship has been reframed since the heyday of the democratic transition in the 1990s.  Emerging from this analysis is an “active citizen” whose commitment to social justice is measured against her or his contribution to the national economy.  Nevertheless, interviews with key actors from government and civil society conducted in Cape Town reveal that the definition of a self-sufficient, responsible, and caring citizen is contested, as projects developed to produce young citizens engage with critical thinking as well as with personal economic advancement. While academic education remains seen as the primary tool for building citizenship, many are exploring alternative pedagogies and experimental training to challenge the status-quo of a profoundly unequal society.  The learning process of various actors involved in youth development suggests that South African citizenship is performed through this complex relationship between a model of economically active citizens and a model of politically conscious citizens. Biography Chloé completed her PhD in geography at the University of Paris Ouest (France). Her doctoral work examined the practices of urban citizenship in Gugulethu and Heideveld (Cape Town). She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) in 2012 and 2013, where she explored the construction of political identities in Luanda, Angola. Since January 2014, Chloé is a post-doctoral research associate at Durham University (UK). She is currently doing fieldwork in Cape Town for YouCitizen, a research project examining the meaning and experience of citizenship for young people in societies with histories of conflict and division (www.youcitizen.org).