Nina Glick Schiller

The University of Manchester · School of Social Sciences

Much of past feminist theorization of social reproduction has concentrated on the domestic sphere. However, in multiple domains such as education, childcare, elder care, health care, the delivery of goods, and migrant settlement, first the state and non-profit organizations and increasingly corporate profit-making service industries emerged as sign...

By querying the social connections that underlie Heath’s and Li’s overview of the peopling of London over the millennia, it becomes clear that London was made as people from elsewhere settled, maintained multiple networks of connection and created local forms of sociability. Generations of migrants built London, as those in power extracted wealth f...

Building on but extending the critiques of concepts of development and migration and development, this article offers a political economic analysis of dispossessive “growth and development.” It speaks to contemporary crises including displacement that are actuated by the interlinked processes of physical mobility and downward social mobility. The a...

Building on but extending the critiques of concepts of development and migration and development, this article offers a political economic analysis of dispossessive «growth and development». It speaks to contemporary crises including displacement actuated by the interlinked processes of physical mobility and downward social mobility. The article ch...

To contribute to the growing literature on comparative urban research, this article speaks to the theoretical and methodological challenges that underlie recent calls for comparative relational approaches to city-making. The relational comparative analysis we develop highlights the multiscalar transformations of relations of power across time and s...

This paper was written right before the covid-19 was understood to be a pandemic. Since that time, political and economic conditions such as austerity measures in public health, uncoordinated national responses and just in time production of medications and protective health equipment have facilitated the pandemic and laid bare the fundamental weak...

Os imigrantes contemporâneos não podem ser caracterizados como "desenraizados". Muitos são transmigrantes, se tornando firmemente enraizados em seu novo país, mas mantendo múltiplos vínculos com sua terra natal. Nos Estados Unidos, os antropólogos estão empenhados em construir uma antropologia transnacional e repensar seus dados sobre imigração. A...

As the world rapidly becomes a different place for migrants and non-migrants alike, this article asks whether transnational migration scholars have an adequate conceptual toolkit to address the temporal dimensions of mobility regimes. The article notes the way those who initiated the transnational framework for the study of migration conceptualised...

Nordic Journal of Migration Research Volume 8: Issue 4 (Dec 2018), Special issue 'Transnational Regimes and Migrant Responses in an Altered Historical Conjuncture', eds. Nina Glick Schiller and Maja Povrzanovic Frykman Open access: https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/njmr/8/4/njmr.8.issue-4.xml

In Migrants and City-Making Ayse Çaglar and Nina Glick Schiller trace the participation of migrants in the unequal networks of power that connect their lives to regional, national, and global institutions. Grounding their work in comparative ethnographies of three cities struggling to regain their former standing—Mardin, Turkey; Manchester, New Ham...

My thoughts on the bombing of the Manchester Arena with implications for the rest of the world

contemporary globally competitive, neoliberal urban restructuring and marketing, scholars and policy makers need a refitted conceptual toolkit. This toolkit must place city-making within the far-reaching forces that are dispossessing people of their land, jobs, resources, neighborhoods, and hopes. To hone a conceptual framework fit to purpose, the...

I offer this paper in the context of the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, the strength of LaPenne in France, La Liga Nord in Italy, the emergence of right wing parties or governments in Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, and the fierce ongoing political repression in Turkey. The goal of this analysis is to speak not only to the processes th...

What is theory? Who does theory? And what can theory do? Is theory important as humans strive to explain, understand, and speak to the nature of their lives? For the re-launch of Anthropological Theory, Julia Eckert, Stephen Reyna, and Nina Glick Schiller, the new editors, challenged members of the Editorial Board to offer their understanding of th...

In this article, I argue that while providing an excellent summary of the past two decades of research on migrants’ transnational connections, the concepts of intersocietal and interpolity convergences and divergences that Roger Waldinger offers in his book The Cross-Border Connection do not contribute to an explanatory framework that can move beyo...

The announcement by the zoo in Augsburg Germany that it was hosting an “African Village” set off a wave of controversy that received widespread media coverage. A global protest developed, fueled by the rapidity of e-mail communication, with concern voiced by African-German organizations, rights organizations, academic associations, a Nobel Prize wi...

This special issue focuses on ‘ways of seeing’ the city and raise questions about current dominant epistemological frameworks for understanding the urban-based sociabilities of people whom policy-makers and researchers frequently speak about as foreign, diverse and requiring integration. Read together, the articles contribute to an emerging relatio...

This article contributes to the discussion of the everyday sociabilities that arise between migrant newcomers and local urban residents. We highlight the proximal, workplace and institutionally based social relations that newcomers and locals construct through finding domains of commonality, noting that in such instances differences are not constit...

We support Eduardo Barberis and Emmanuele Pavolini's call for further explorations of the relationships between migration and localities that are not " gateway cities " including towns and rural areas. Their project points beyond methodological nationalism and builds on the critical geography of the neoliberal restructuring of cities. They wish to...

Der Artikel fasst wichtige Begriffe und Ergebnisse der Transnationalismusforschung der letzten 20 Jahre zusammen und schlägt einen Bogen zu aktuellen Debatten. Er konzentriert sich vor allem auf die Kritiken des methodologischen Nationalismus, der „ethnischen Brille“ (ethnic lens) und des „Fetischs der ethnischen Vereine“. Vor diesem Hintergrund wi...

To speak of the transnationality of cities is to place the urban within the synergies and tensions of the mutual construction of the local, national, and global. This perspective also focuses the attention of scholars and policy makers on the ways in which migrants and their transnational connectivities are constitutive of the urban. In this chapte...

The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume a...

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article and Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue of JEMS...

This article reinforces the calls, including those articulated by the editors of this special issue, for scholarship that does not rely on an ethnic lens to study migrant practices, socialities and identities. We offer a concept of migrant emplacement that focuses analytical attention on the relationship between the economic, political and cultural...

This article addresses the thorny and re-emergent issue of comparative urban studies by offering some initial thoughts on the need for a relative scalar approach to the comparative study of cities. Cities are approached as entry points into the mutual constitution of local, regional, national, and global positional scales of differentiated but conn...

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article and Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue of JEMS...

This article queries the pervasiveness of binary thinking in contemporary identity studies. Reviewing the genealogy of binary alterity beginning with the synergies between the European Enlightenment and colonialism, I note the binary logics that remained embedded within the apparently disparate schools of structuralist and poststructuralist theory....

The question posed by this article is how all of us - scholars, musicians, citizens of the world can step out of the migrant/native divide and still leave room to study and theorize creative processes that bring together the intertwining of cultural influences. How can we discard a concept of hybridity with its implications of a prior state of nati...

The author examines how multiculturalism was endorsed by political and economic city leaders in their initial efforts to reinvent their city within an agenda of neoliberal restructuring, but rejected generally by the very migrants deemed to embody cultural difference. The migrants in the case study � from a wide array of countries � countered the p...

This special issue features ethnographies that examine the trajectories of mobile people within particular places, moments and networks of connection. Critiquing the ready equation of cosmopolitanism with experiences of mobility, we examine the encounters of pilgrims, migrants, missionaries or members of a diaspora. Defining cosmopolitanism as a si...

Challenging the divide between political activism in the streets and in the University that is frequently made by US academics, this commentary links insights about regimes of truth to the concept of scholar/activism. Three different forms of scholar activism are delineated: (1) direct political engagement; (2) acting as a public intellectual; and...

Locating Migration responds to the need to think beyond existing scholarships and established paradigms when discussing and studying the relationship between cities and migration.The book explores the varying pathways that migrants of different occupational, class, cultural, racialized, or religious backgrounds have established in a range of cities...

On a phone booth in Manchester, England — where I now live as a transmigrant — I saw an advertisement that read: ‘Send money home from closer to home.’ It went on to announce that you can send funds to locations around the world from any British Post Office. The Post Office, whose sales operations have now been privatized, has joined businesses aro...

The article examines methodological nationalism, a conceptual tendency that was central to the development of the social sciences and undermined more than a century of migration studies. Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the global regime of nation-states by the social sciences. Transnational studies, we argue, including the study...

The relationship between migration and development is becoming an important field of study, yet the fundamentals - analytical tools, conceptual framework, political stance - are not being called into question or dialogue. This volume provides a valuable alternative perspective to the current literature as the contributors explore the contradictory...

In this book Nina Glick Schiller and Ayşe Çağlar, along with a stellar group of contributing authors, examine the relationship between migrants and cities in a time of massive urban restructuring. They find that locality matters in migration research and migrants matter in the reconfiguration of contemporary cities. This book provides a new approac...

Questioning the units of analysis of contemporary migration theory—the nation-state, the ethnic group, and the transnational community—that structure discussions of migration and development, I argue for a global perspective on migration. In deploying these units of analysis, current discourses about migration and development reflect a profound met...

The lyrics of Ti Manno, a popular Haitian singer, and the short-lived Ti Manno movement are examined in order to elucidate the factors that shape the multiple and overlapping identities of Haitian immigrants. It is argued that, as black immigrants, Haitians tend to be ???transnationals??? who form identities that allow them to accommodate to and re...