Lecture | Whiteness and Migration Studies (Claudia Sadowski-Smith)

Public attitudes toward Ukrainian refugees in various European countries, and their ability to access EU temporary protections, differ signficantly from the way migrants were received during the “refugee crisis” in 2015. These differences are often attributed to Ukrainians’ “whiteness.” The recent designation of temporary protected status for Ukrainians already in the United States and their exemption from expulsion at the US-Mexico border, which is not granted to other refugees, have also been linked to different forms of migrant racialization. This presentation inserts US and European scholarship on whiteness more firmly into migration studies. It expands upon my work on the racialization of post-Soviet migrants in the United States and discusses intersections with scholarship on the "not quite" whiteness of post-Soviet and Central/Eastern European migrants in Western Europe.

Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Professor of English and American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Immigrant Whiteness: Neoliberalism, Race, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018) and Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008). She is the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002) and of three special journal issues--on the cultures of global postsocialisms, comparative border studies, and postsocialist literatures in the United States. In addition, Sadowski-Smith has published on climate migration, comparative histories of US migration, transnational adoption, and transnational reality TV. She is in Regensburg as a visiting professor at the ScienceCampus from May to July 2022.

When?  Wednesday, June 1, 16:00

Where?  H14, UR Campus