When big national and international news breaks, Barnard faculty step up to share scholarship that helps the College community put it into context. This is why the Office of the Provost launched the Barnard Year of Elections Around the World series last October — to examine critical issues shaping elections and dividing societies globally, including immigration, reproductive rights, climate change, and digital transformation.
Last month, five faculty members from various disciplines gathered for the third event in the series, “Global Migration & Local Action: Perspectives on Citizenship, Race, and Sanctuary,” to offer different ways to examine and confront the politics of immigration and migration on both global and local scales.
“The Year of Elections Around the World series was designed to leverage the diverse expertise of Barnard faculty, providing our community with analytical, historical, and conceptual tools to engage with both emerging and ongoing global issues,” said Melissa Wright (left), executive director of the Center for Engaged Pedagogy, who organized the event with Alexander Cooley, Vice Provost for Research and Academic Centers and Claire Tow Professor of Political Science.
“Like our first two events in the series — Global Reproductive Rights & Resistance and the Post-Election Community Forum — we intentionally organized the Global Migration & Local Action event to bring students, faculty, and staff together at a time when we knew our community would be eager for historical context, conceptual clarity, and a sense of purpose,” said Wright.
The panel of speakers included professors Thea Abu El-Haj (education), who explored citizenship; Abosede George (history and Africana studies), who examined the racial discourse of immigration in the U.S.; Nara Milanich (history), who reflected on the shift in language from “immigrant” to “migrant” in recent years; and Randa Serhan (sociology), who discussed the concept of sanctuary cities. Professor J.C. Salyer (anthropology and human rights) moderated the Q&A that followed the panel.
“By looking at global migration through the lens of keywords or phrases, we can develop a shared language for dialogue and analysis,” said Rebecca L. Walkowitz (right), Claire Tow Professor of English and Provost and Dean of the Faculty, who gave opening remarks. “Events like this one offer us a kind of liberal arts education in miniature. We will see, here, how different intellectual frameworks allow us to approach and better understand an urgent topic of our moment.”
Read highlights from their lectures below, edited for length and clarity.
Thea Abu El-Haj, Professor of Education, on “Citizenship”
Citizenship isn’t such a simple, uncontested idea, even if you have juridical citizenship. We all know that the 14th Amendment arises from the fact that entire generations of enslaved Africans were not given rights in this country. As an anthropologist, I think about another definition of citizenship as being the lived experience of belonging and of exclusion — the everyday practices of trying to make a place, engage in public life, in communities, and to claim our rights. That is another way to understand what we’re seeing [around] mass global migration, which is to think about what is calling people to move, again, in huge extreme duress to themselves. I think of these lived experiences as transnational forms of citizenship — belonging and rights as unhitched from juridical citizenship.
Abosede George, Professor of History, on “Race”
A key starting question is the category of Black immigrants and how it interacts with the idea of [being] Black in the U.S. — which is connected to a longer history of descendants of American slavery — and the idea of the immigrant, which is often racialized as non-Black. Where do Black immigrants fall [within] this? The history of civil rights, from the 1860s, the 1960s, and continuing [today] reflects a long-standing war between the idea of America as a white nation and the idea of America as a diverse nation, within which all the members reflecting different regions of the world are equally a part of and entitled to. This war between the two ideas of America finds the immigration system as one of its battlegrounds. It’s one of the places where this war gets played out — in the immigration system, in discourse about immigration laws, [and] about immigration in rhetoric.
Nara Milanich, Professor of History, on “Migrant”
Language matters because the debate about immigration, today, is as much a battle of narratives as anything else. “Migrant” has become a commonplace word in our quotidian vocabulary, edging out the word “immigrant.” The several million folks who have crossed the Mexico-U.S. border in the past several years are routinely referred to as migrants, not immigrants. This is a subtle but very significant shift. “Migrant” implies a person on the move, with no intention to stay and therefore no right to do so. The latest Executive Orders laid bare this transience by summarily abolishing the tenuous legal status many newcomers have. The word “migrant” distinguishes this group from “immigrants,” creating divides between recent and more established newcomers. It also disconnects the present from the past, obfuscating the parallels between the present influx of immigrants and past waves — for example, in the early 20th century.
Randa Serhan, Term Associate Professor of Sociology, on “Sanctuary Cities”
As a sociologist, I think about processes, the interactions between macro and micro, and the impact on communities. The moral panics have been produced by design to create a situation of uncertainty. The attacks on sanctuary cities were incremental on a set of policies that were already precarious. The impact on communities has been to instill fear and also to encourage turning people in and reporting on others in the community and snitching. We know from 9/11 onwards, these have been tactics that have disrupted communities and destroyed trust that has taken a couple of decades to rebuild in some communities. There is always resistance and resilience, which gives New Yorkers hope. They have been here before. After 9/11, people did not know how to respond and accepted FBI voluntary interviews and did not have any defenses. Since then, “Know Your Rights” campaigns have become commonplace in churches, schools, and community centers. Where there is contention, possibilities arise.
—Reporting by Tara Terranova '25
