Pardee Center to Host Conference on How Migrants Impact Their Homelands

Experts from a variety of disciplines and from around the world will meet at Pardee House on Friday, September 25, 2009, to present at a conference on How Migrants Impact their Homelands. The authors’ conference is part of a research project of the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, being led by Pardee Center Faculty Fellow Prof. Susan Eckstein and Pardee Center Director Prof. Adil Najam.

This conference is restricted to project participants who will present their papers and discuss each other’s papers. The final output of the project is expected to be an edited book containing these papers.

The goal of the project is to bring together scholarship and insight from a variety of social science disciplines, and examples across the globe, on how diasporas and immigrant communities impact the countries they left behind. This book/conference project seeks to build upon a number of exciting literatures that have emerged in different disciplines that address social, economic, cultural, and political effects diasporas in different regions of the world have on the country they originally came from.

9:00 -11:00: Session 1
Susan Eckstein and Adil Najam
Welcome and Introduction

Alejandro Portes
“Migration and Development: Reconciling Opposite Views”

Rhacel Parrenas
“The Gender Revolution in the Philippines: Migrant Mothering and Social Transformations”

Victor Agadjanian
“Economic Uncertainties, Social Strains, and HIV Risks: Exploring the Effects of Male Labor Migration on Rural Women in Mozambique”

11:00 – 11:15: Break

11:15 – 12:45: Session 2

David Fitzgerald
“Emigration’s Impacts on Mexico: A Sociology of Dissimilation”

Susan Eckstein
“How Cuban Americans Unwittingly Have Transformed Socialism as Cubans Knew It”

Jose Cruz
“The Dark Side of Social Remittances: Migration and Transnational Gangs in Central America”

12:45 – 1:30: Lunch

1:30 – 3:00: Session 3

Cinzia Solari
“Resource Drain and Constitutive Circularity: Unpacking the Effects of Post-Soviet Emigration Patterns on Ukraine”

Hung Cam Thai
“The Relationship bewtween Remittances and Homeland Return Visits in teh Vietnamese Diaspora”

Riva Kastoryano
“Turks Abroad’ Redefining Turkish Nationalism”

3:00 – 3:15: Break

3:15 – 4:45: Session 4

Min Ye
“Overseas Chinese and China: How Diasporas Contributed to China’s Openness Policy in 1978-1992”

Kyle Eischen
“Indian Migrants and New Industrial Evolutions: The Role of Returning Indians in the Globalization of India”

Adil Najam and Nabeela Ahmed
“How Pakistanis Abroad Impact Pakistan”

4:45 – 5:30: Wrap-up and Closing