RAI RESEARCH WEBINAR
A VIRTUAL SEMINAR SERIES BY THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE
Thursday 24 June 2021 at 4.00 – 6.00pm (BST)
At the Intersection of Urban Anthropology and Migration Studies: Locating the French in London
Prof Deborah Reed-Danahay, University at Buffalo (SUNY)
This webinar will be held on Zoom, to register go here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sTU4efahQdKlU1ZX9ieHmg
In this seminar I will reflect on the challenges of studying middle-class European migrants in one of the largest European cities — London — in order to explore new ways of thinking about cities and migration. I have been engaged in an ethnographic study of French citizens living in London since 2014. My discussion will draw upon this experience and my previous fieldwork in rural France (among Auvergnat dairy farming families) and in suburban Texas (among former Vietnamese refugee families) to consider my transition to becoming an urban anthropologist. I will touch upon the question of: How to “locate” the French in London? That is, how to understand their social and geographical locations and trajectories in London? And, how to analyse their positionings in French “social space”? With reference also to my most recent book Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements (Berghahn, 2020), this seminar will highlight Bourdieu’s potential contributions to urban ethnographies of mobile people.
Biography
Professor Deborah Reed-Danahay has conducted ethnographic research in Europe (France and the UK) and in the United States. She is co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology. She held a Jean Monnet Chair from 2015-2018, and is a past-President of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and a former Yip Fellow (2012) at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She is the author or editor of 6 books.
Her most recent book is Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements (Berghahn, 2019).
