Learn how the coronavirus crisis is affecting immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, including new healthcare, public benefits, and detention policies these populations face. Einaudi Center Migrations faculty fellows Steve Yale-Loehr and Gunisha Kaur will discuss Weill Cornell and Cornell University’s efforts to assist immigrants through Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell.

Moderator: Eleanor Paynter, Einaudi Center Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow

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‘Our parents couldn’t teach us what Islam actually is!’ This assertion, made by a 24-year-old youth, epitomizes the critical stance of second-generation Italian-Bangladeshis towards the religiosity of first-generation migrants. Based on ethnographic research within the Bangladeshi community in Rome, this presentation illustrates the apparently oxymoronic characteristics of a discourse of Muslim-ness which, despite stressing the importance of a return to the primary sources of Islam, combines this revivalist attitude with a peculiar emphasis on ‘integration’, and with modernist positions. In fact, for these youths, the religion practiced by the adults is both ‘impure’, i.e. an Islam too much influenced by the ‘Bangladeshi culture’, and ‘not integrated’ in the European context, i.e. an Islam incapable of offering to the Italian society a modern, and reassuring, image of Muslim people, and consequently unable to cope with a growing Islamophobia. I will show how this counter-intuitive combination is not only inspired by the teachings of Tariq Ramadan, and by his idea of a ‘European Islam’, but first and foremost it is grounded in the concrete life conditions of Muslim youths who are both well-integrated in the Italian society and animated by religious zeal. In this way, I seek to shed light on the mutual entanglement of religious stances and life experiences, and to highlight the limits of what Samuli Schielke calls ‘exceptionalist’ and ‘literalist’ approaches to the study of religion.

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Central Asians made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Traveling long distances, many lived for extended periods in Ottoman cities dotting the routes. Though technically foreigners, these hajjis often blurred the lines between pilgrims and migrants. Not quite Ottoman, and not quite foreign, Central Asians became the sultan's spiritual subjects. Their status was continually negotiated by Ottoman statesmen as attempts to exclude foreign Muslim nationals from the body politic were compromised by a changing international legal order and the caliphate's ecumenical claims. Spiritual Subjects examines the paradoxes of nationality reform and pan-Islamic politics in late Ottoman history. Lâle Can unravels how imperial belonging was wrapped up in deeply symbolic religious rites, as well as prosaic acts and experiences that paved the way to integration into Ottoman communities. A complex system of belonging emerged—one where it was possible for a Muslim to be both, by law, a foreigner and a subject of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. This panoramic story informs broader transregional and global developments during the steamship era, with important implications for how we make sense of subject-hood in the last Muslim empire and the legacy of religion in the Turkish Republic.

Across the world, injustice perpetuates racial and ethnic inequalities, including policing practices, census and identity card categorizations, access to healthcare, education, employment, mobility, and political representation. Racial and ethnic inequalities are fundamentally about differential access to power, resources, protections, and rights. These injustices share common elements, but different histories and contexts shape them.

In this session of our webinar series, four experts on race and ethnicity will analyze global inequalities as they are experienced in local and regional forms, and analyze the implications of the contemporary moment for transformative change.

Moderator:

Rachel Beatty Riedl, Director of the Einaudi Center and Professor, Government Department, Cornell University.
Riedl teaches comparative and African politics, with an emphasis on political parties, democracy, and authoritarianism.

Panelists:

Prerna Singh, Political Science, Brown University.
Singh's research focuses on the intersection of ethnic conflict and competition, and the improvement of human well-being, particularly in the promotion of social welfare in South Asia.

Pap Ndiaye, History, Sciences Po (Paris).
Ndiaye's research focuses on transnational philosophies of race that draw both from American and French political thought, especially as they apply to the African diaspora populations of both countries.

Alisha Holland, Government, Harvard University.
Holland researches the comparative political economy of development with a focus on urban politics, social policy, and Latin America.

Leo Arriola, Political Science, University of California Berkeley.
Arriola studies comparative politics with a focus on democratization and governance in Africa.