Winter Lecture 6 - Emigration and the rise of diaspora institutions Event as iCalendar

Speaker: Associate Professor Alan Gamlen, Hugo Centre for Population and Migration Research, University of Adelaide

Migration policy has always been about managing inflows of people, a task to which classical settler societies like New Zealand are well accustomed. But emigration and diaspora policies are an increasingly important feature of the political landscape of the 21st Century as many countries including New Zealand struggle to adapt to the increasing external mobility and long-distance participation of their own people living in other countries.

Formal government offices dedicated to emigrants and their descendants in the diaspora have recently been established in well over half of all United Nations Member States. Many more countries have, like New Zealand, experimented with government-funded programmes aimed at ‘engaging the diaspora’. Why is this happening and what does it mean for the evolution of citizenship, sovereignty and territoriality in the 21st century?

In this lecture I will present findings from a five-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust through the Oxford Diasporas Programme, explaining the rise of diaspora institutions and discussing why it matters in the 21^st century, not least for countries like New Zealand.

The Winter Lecture series:

This lecture is the final in a series of six lectures on consecutive Wednesdays - Nation Transformed: the place of migration in 21st century Aotearoa-New Zealand

Contact: Dr Francis Collins or Dr Ward Friesen