The IES European Transitions Speaker Series: Moritz Schramm

January 14, 2020
12:30-1:45pm
C.K. Choi. Building Rm #120

Lunch will be served at 12:00pm

Radical Diversity: Postmigrant Perspectives on Art, Culture and Politics   
Moritz Schramm, University of Southern Denmark

In recent years, the concept of postmigration and the notion of a postmigrant society have had a significant impact on the social sciences, as well as in the humanities in Europe. Partly growing out of the theatre scene in Berlin, Germany, postmigration is often seen as a political catchword or even a critical intervention in both public and academic discourses on migration and integration. The term does not signal an end of migration, but rather refers to the overall negotiations and conflicts taking place in societies that are fundamentally shaped by earlier and ongoing migration movements. In this lecture, he will introduce the developing concept of postmigration and its academic reception, before exploring it as an analytical perspective, reframing or even challenging widespread concepts such as ‘super-diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. With a focus on the idea of ‘radical diversity’, insisting on the undisputable multiplicity of all individual backgrounds, the paper wants to discuss the consequences of the new concept for art and culture, as well as for politics.

Bio – Moritz Schramm is Associate Professor at the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on the interrelation between migration and culture, among others on post-migrant theatre, literature and film in several European countries. He is an interdisciplinary trained expert in Political Sciences and Cultural Studies and is a member of the German “Council for Migration”, consisting of more than 150 scholars from different fields in migration studies. Among his recent publications are: Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition, NY: Routledge 2019 (together with Anne Ring Petersen, Sten Moslund et al.), and The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories, IB Tauris 2015 (ed. with A.R. Petersen and S. Moslund).