Apr 17
Race, Islam, and Dilemmas of Belonging in Post-Migratory Europe
Thu, April 17, 2025
• 5:30pm
- 7:00pm (1h 30m) • Leighton 304
On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul – where Balkan worked as an undertaker – this talk explores migrants’ end-of-life dilemmas, illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.
A lecture by Dr. Osman Balkan (U. of Pennsylvania), author of Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023), winner of the American Political Science Association's 2024 Charles Taylor Book Award for Best Book in Political Science Employing or Developing Interpretive Methodologies & Methods.
Co-sponsored by Religion, Political Science, Middle East Studies, and European Studies.
from Religion
Event Contact: Kambiz GhaneaBassiri