In mid-June, Donna Gabaccia and Daniel Necas visited Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to confer with colleagues and to lay the foundation for a symposium and archivists' workshop on letter-writing during international migration. (These events will be held in Vienna in Spring 2012, with support from the University of Minnesota's Center for Austrian Studies.)
By Walker Bosch
That is the message of Phillipe Legraine in his interview with the New York Time's Freakonomics blog. Moral viewpoints drive policy debates across a wide spectrum of issue areas, and immigration is no different.
By Minna Rainio
Even though I am a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, and don't really think of myself as an immigrant, I find the cultural dynamics described in fiction written by immigrants to be very familiar.
By Beatriz Carrillo, MN 2.0 Project Team
In the Minnesota 2.0 project I have been cataloging Facebook groups that relate to a Mexican or Mexican American identity. I am interested in how the media is used by different groups of people and as a part of this project I have learned how youth use Facebook and how non-Mexicans view Mexico.
By Suk Her, MN 2.0 Project Team
As part of my research with Minnesota 2.0, I have been examining and documenting Hmong Facebook groups and fan pages. Despite being Hmong myself, I am learning more things about Hmong youth identity.
By Salma Hussein and Mustafa Jumale
The "Minnesota 2.0" project has allowed us to look at Facebook from a different standpoint, and analyze the complexity within it. We are able to see that young immigrant youth of Somali descent are actively engaging in sharing their stories via social networking sites such as Facebook.
By Donna R. Gabaccia, Director, Immigration History Research Center
In debates about immigration, Americans prefer watery metaphors--of waves or streams of migrants washing into the United States. Maybe that's why so many imagine that their government can simply "turn off the tap." World historians explain why such faucets don't always work.
By Rachel Ida Buff, Associate Professor in History and Coordinator, Comparative Ethnic Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
When I speak to Jewish audiences about the contemporary politics of immigration, I often lean on the historical parallels between contemporary migrations and Jewish experience of diaspora, in which Jews have so often been the strangers.
By Johanna Leinonen, IHRC Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History
Are Americans ever emigrants or immigrants? As part of my dissertation project, I have been reading about Americans who have opted to leave their home country and make their home abroad.
By Donna Gabaccia, Director, Immigration History Research Center
For me, summer reading means escape, largely through fiction that is as unrelated as possible to my scholarly work. Imagine my surprise then when I opened two new novels pulled randomly from the shelves of the Minneapolis Public Library. Both featured main characters who were very much "on the move."
