Please join us for the first event of our 2023/24 CMS Speaker Series, Integration Reimagined.
RSVP below for event, or event+lunch
Abstract
When the Trump Administration made Christian refugees an exception to its “Muslim Ban,” pundits wondered if this would require the government to assess who were real Christians. Does the state have the right or capacity to establish an asylum-seeker’s religious identity? What kinds of practical challenges, legal intricacies, and moral dilemmas do immigration bureaucrats, religious actors, and asylum-seekers face? The lecture explores these questions through the case of ethnic Korean migrants from China who apply for asylum in the U.S. as Christians. It highlights how migration governance, transnational religion, and politics of humanitarianism are navigated on the ground with its full complexity and contradictions.
Speaker Bio
Jaeeun Kim is the Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology and the Professor of Law (by Courtesy) at the University of Michigan. She studies race/ethnicity/nationalism and international migration and citizenship from a comparative-historical and transnational perspective. Kim is the author of the award-winning book, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea (Stanford University Press 2016; paperback 2020). Her article “Migration-Facilitating Capital: A Bourdieusian Theory of International Migration” (Sociological Theory 2018) won the 2019 Theory Prize from the American Sociological Association.
RSVP for this event is closed. Please join us for the next CMS Integration Reimagined Speaker Series event on Nov 6th.