The Belonging Lab
The Belonging Lab is a space for scholars and students to think
together about questions of migration, mobility, borders, and
citizenship—both in historical and contemporary forms. The Lab is
especially focused on issues of archiving, documenting and witnessing
and exploring different genres that interrogate the political economy of socio-legal
citizenship.
Our discussions include thinking about belonging as a scholarly “keyword”
and how we capture its meaning through different methods and sites. We
investigate the peculiar challenges of being researchers interested in
questions of “belonging”: how do we imagine the afterlives of our
scholarly texts on belonging? How might we be mindful collectors and
archivists of our inquiries and the answers they generate and think of
new forms / forms that these answers might inhabit? How do we work
with and alongside collectors, archivists, illustrators and curators
of migration / mobility questions?
The theme for 2025 - ‘26 will be Citizenship.
October 31, 2.30 PM ET: Lydia Walker (Ohio State) and Darren Wan (Cornell) on migration and citizenship in the 1960s
November 7, 10 AM ET: Mohsin Alam Bhat (Queen Mary University of London), Arushi Gupta (Columbia) and Radha Kumar (Syracuse) on citizenship deprivation in India