Organizing Integration
Short description
The program examines the challenges and opportunities created by novel initiatives to support labour market integration of foreign-born persons in Sweden – including the problems of coordination between initiatives. Focusing on both top-down and bottom-up initiatives, the program will investigate the following issues:
What ideas of integration give rise to and are promoted by the contemporary integration initiatives?How is the labour market integration of foreign-born persons organised in practice? That is, which organisations, groups and individuals become enrolled in integration activities, how do they react to the integration initiatives, and what do they do?
What are the effects of integration initiatives – on foreign-born persons' lives, and on their labour market integration in terms of diversity, gender and power relations?
Sara Brorström
Barbara Czarniawska
Andreas Diedrich
Emma Ek Österberg
Hanna Hellgren
Eva Maria Jernsand
Helena Kraff
Vedran Omanovic
Maria-José Zapata Campos
Patrik Zapata
Quang Evansluong
Sara Glännefors
Contemporary issues like climate change, international conflicts, economic challenges, and political repression will continue to spur the movement of people around the globe. While such movements have tended to promote images of chaos, in fact the processes, systems and practices that shape the movement of people around the globe and aim to introduce them into new societies are organised in many different ways.
We therefore depart from the recognition that migration and integration today involves a myriad of actors and processes. This includes not only state actors like international and regional bodies, state agencies and municipalities, but also companies, interest groups, civil society organizations and even individuals. These actors engage in a wide variety of activities from protecting labor rights, ensuring fair access, improving migrants’ health, supporting education, promoting migrants’ inclusion into the labour market, preventing radicalization, or securing migrants’ civic, social and legal inclusion in the new country. While some of these efforts are planned and involve years of preparation and the engagement of large coalition of actors; others are ephemeral and ad hoc, emerging from one day to the next only to disappear again quickly. From a coordination and organizing perspective, this myriad of actors and activities separated in time and space poses not only far-reaching challenges, but also great opportunities.
Therefore, at OMICS 2023 we will explore the organization (and disorganization) of migration and integration. Drawing across a wide range of disciplines this conference seeks to examine the meanings and manifestations of organizing in migration and integration—considering both the inclusions and exclusions produced by different forms and processes of organizing (and disorganizing). These challenges and opportunities demand novel and critical research and interdisciplinary approaches from a wide range of disciplines.
The Centre on Global Migration and the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, therefore invites scholars from many disciplines and all parts of the globe to the Organizing Migration and Integration in Contemporary Societies Conference, 15–17 November, 2023, in Gothenburg, Sweden.