Events

Public Conversation Series

The NYU Migration Network’s public conversations will be held monthly in the spring of 2024, and each one will bring a prominent non-NYU scholar and/or artist who engages with questions of migration and mobility and an NYU scholar and/or artist who works on similar issues but from a different disciplinary perspective together into a public conversation.

The hope is to create a thought-provoking and cross-disciplinary conversation that can help us identify and refine broader approaches and vocabularies for addressing migration and mobility dynamics, histories, and stakes. In addition to opening a space to reflect on migration, the Public Conversation events will be structured to promote connection and community at NYU and beyond.

The public conversations will be held monthly in 2024, on occasional Thursdays, in the early evening, and each event will start with a short cocktail reception. The public conversation will run about an hour: it will begin with a short introduction of the speakers, followed by the public conversation about 40 minutes in which the NYU scholar will act as an interlocutor/discussant, and then a short 15 min question and answer period.

All public conversations will be held in the Rudin Forum at the Wagner School of Public Service (295 Lafayette Street, Second Floor, New York, NY 10012). 

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February 15, 2024

Asian Americans and the Curse of Competence 

TIME: 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Jennifer Lee (Columbia University) and Crystal Parikh (NYU) will engage in conversation on "Asian Americans and the Curse of Competence."

Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University. An award-winning author and experienced public commentator, she has been uniquely successful in placing the study of Asian Americans centrally in the discipline. She is author or co-author of four-award winning books, including Asian American Achievement Paradox which garnered five national book awards. In it, she and her co-author dispel the cultural fallacy that Asian Americans excel in education because they value education more than other groups. Her work has also focused on immigrant entrepreneurship and ethnic conflict, intermarriage and multiracial identification, the battle over affirmative action, and the surge in anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, which she presented to the Biden-Harris COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. In her most recent project, Lee shifts our attention to the workplace, where Asian Americans lag behind all racial and ethnic groups in promotion to managerial and executive ranks in spite of their education, work experience, and job performance. Presumed competent, Asian Americans are not presumed fit to lead

Crystal Parikh is Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis and English at New York University. She specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary transnational American literature and culture, with a focus on comparative race and ethnic studies, as well as ethical and political theory and gender and sexuality studies. In addition to numerous essays and articles, Professor Parikh has published Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Literature. She is also the author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2009), which was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary Studies. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2019), and she co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015). Professor Parikh is currently serving as the Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

This public conversation is co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, the Department of Sociology, and the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

RSVP Here

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March 14, 2024

A City of the World 

TIME: 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Phil Kasinitz (CUNY) and Marion Casey (NYU) will engage in conversation on migration to New York City from the mid-19th century to the present in a conversation entitled, "A City of the World."

Philip Kasinitz is Presidential Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, where he chaired the doctoral program in Sociology from 2001 to 2018. He co-founded and was the first director of CUNY’s master’s program in International Migration and is director of CUNY’s Advanced Research Collaborative. His co-authored book Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age received the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 2010. Other recent books include Growing Up Muslim in Europe and the United States, co-edited with Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Global Cities, Local Streets, with Sharon Zukin, and Xiangming Chen. He was the book review editor of the journal Sociological Forum from 2005 to 2023. Kasinitz is a member of the historical advisory committee for the National Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island and has been a consultant to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

 

Marion R. Casey trained as an historian with David N. Doyle at University College Dublin and with David M. Reimers at New York University.  Her goals are to use the longevity of Irish emigration to illuminate the evolving ethnic and racial experience in the United States; to explore diaspora and transnationalism from Irish and American perspectives; and to teach students how to think historically. In 1997 she established the Archives of Irish America in New York University’s Bobst Library and in 1999 she was named a Centennial Historian of the City of New York. Casey is Clinical Professor of Irish Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of History at New York University. She has contributed to many public history projects including exhibits and documentary films, and has published essays on a wide range of subjects. With J. J. Lee, she co-edited Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (2016) and her new book, The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image, will be published in April 2024.

 

This public conversation is co-sponsored by the History Department, the Glucksman Ireland House, the Department of Sociology, and the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

RSVP Here

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April 24, 2024

Managing Crisis: Public Communication on Global Displacement 

TIME: 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Mohamad Bazzi (NYU) and Melissa Fleming (United Nations) will engage in conversation on "Managing Crisis: Public Communication on Global Displacement."

Melissa Fleming is Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications at the United Nations, having taken up her post in September 2019. Ms. Fleming leads the UN’s Department of Global Communications, which is responsible for informing global audiences about the state of the world and engaging them to build support for the Organization’s work and goals. In this role, Ms. Fleming oversees the UN’s strategic communications operations, including its multilingual news and digital media services, public outreach programmes, and global campaigns. Under her leadership, the UN Department of Global Communications engages in far-reaching efforts to address misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech. She is leading on the development of a Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms. Previously, Ms. Fleming served 10 years at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) as Head of Global Communications. Prior to that, she was the Spokesperson and Head of Media and Outreach at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). She also headed the Press and Public Information team at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Ms. Fleming is a TED speaker, the author of the book, A Hope More Powerful than the Sea, and the host of the award-winning UN podcast, Awake at Night. Ms. Fleming holds a Master of Science in Journalism from the College of Communication, Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts in German Studies from Oberlin College.

 

Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of journalism at New York University. From 2019 to 2021, he was associate director of NYU’s Journalism Institute. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He was also the 2008 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR. Before joining the NYU faculty, Bazzi was the Middle East bureau chief at Newsday, where he established bureaus in Baghdad and Beirut. He was the lead writer on the Iraq war and its aftermath. He also served as Newsday’s United Nations bureau chief and as a metro reporter in New York City. His essays and commentaries on the Middle East have appeared in The New York Times, London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other publications Bazzi has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2017 and 2016 National Headliner Award; the 2016 National Society of Newspaper Columnists Award; the 2008 Arthur Ross Award for distinguished reporting and analysis on foreign affairs; and other accolades.

This public conversation is co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

RSVP Here