Migration Research Center at Koç University International Summer School "Diasporas and Transnational Communities" (29 June-10 July 2015)

The Call for Applications is now opened. Submissions are due by midnight GMT on Sunday, 25 April 2015.

This year MiReKoc Summer School will explore the theme of “Diasporas and Transnational Communities”. Described as “awkward dance partners” by Thomas Faist, the concepts of diasporas and transnational communities have been increasingly coined together within the international migration scholarship in the last decades. While the old concept of diaspora has initially been used to characterize specific (and usually victimized) populations living outside of an (imagined) homeland, the term of transnational communities was taken into account within the larger framework of transnationalism studies, evoking continuous ties across states’ physical borders. Even though many scholars agree that both terms address cross-border linkages of certain populations, the intellectual debate lingers on how well the two terms overlap with each other.

The MiReKoc International Summer School of 2015 will be focusing on the discussions around diasporas, transnational communities and transnationalism. The Summer School will consist of two weeks of lectures and discussions led by a distinguished international faculty, combined with seminars led by NGO representatives and a field trip within Istanbul. In this year’s Summer School, the theoretical discussions will be examined along with the case studies of transnational communities from the world, as well as of communities in and from Turkey.

This program is designed for PhD and graduate students as well as junior experts in the field. Applications from all over the world are encouraged. If you have any further queries, please contact the Summer School team by miss@ku.edu.tr.