Some European women who joined the Islamic State during the 2010s have had their citizenship revoked, which leaves them in a liminal state in camps at the Syrian border. Others are able to return home, where they face prosecution and potential pathways to “rehabilitation”. This public talk turns to media discussions of Shamima Begum, a British national, whose citizenship was revoked, and Laura Hansen, a Dutch national, who was rehabilitated. Centering the concept of social reproduction, and disaggregating it into symbolic, material, and affective components, professor Korteweg will show how each plays a critical role in public responses to women’s rights claims.

Media discourses create a gendered, racialized, and class-based conceptualization of citizenship unattainable to those whose social reproductive labour as mothers and wives, as well as their own social reproduction as daughters, is deemed a threat to the nation-state. Seeing the revocation-rehabilitation continuum through the lens of social reproduction clarifies how citizenship revocation can potentially be understood as a contemporary articulation of a form of eugenics in European migration societies. 

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Masterclass

Also, Professor Korteweg will engage to a workshop and Masterclass with PhD students, focused on their personal research projects. Academia is increasingly shaped by collaborative work and a capacity to communicate across a range of publics is critical to the academic enterprise. Accordingly, the class will be focused on building research communities, developing presentation skills, and deepening understanding of academic publishing.

For the Master Class, each PhD candidate will submit a short paper that gives insight into their research; this could range from an initial research proposal, to extensive research memos, to drafts of articles or chapters. Students will present each other’s research so they can experience how colleagues perceive their work, followed by a group discussion. Professor Korteweg will bring to this master class experience gleaned from successful supervisions of eight PhD students in the past five years, five of whom currently hold tenure-track positions, with one in a post-doc, one a lecturer, and one a successful independent researcher. In addition, as a Co-Editor of Social Politics she would be the right person to share information about the backstage of academic journal publishing.

Lastly, Anna Korteweg will be available to meet and engage with faculty and students on the following days:

• Monday May 30 to Friday June 3
• Monday June 6
• Monday June 13 to Friday June 17

About Anna Korteweg 

Anna C. Korteweg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto (PhD, Sociology, University of California Berkeley, 2004). Her research focuses on the ways in which the perceived problems of immigrant integration are constructed in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity, and national origin. From this critical vantage point, she has published extensively on debates surrounding the wearing of the headscarf, so-called “honour-based” violence, and Sharia law.

Her current projects look at the return of women who joined ISIS to their European home countries, the co-construction of borders and subjectivity in LGBTQ+ refugee politics, and the citizenship implications of refugee sponsorship in Canada. Professor Korteweg also focuses on creative avenues for communicating ideas, including digital storytelling and podcasting. Professor Korteweg has published the two monographs: The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford University Press 2014, with Gökçe Yurdakul); Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (edited with Jennifer Selby, University of Toronto Press 2012).

In addition, she has published 29 articles in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, as well as numerous book chapters and non-peer reviewed materials. Her research has been funded by multiple SSHRC grants and funding from the DAAD and CERIS. Anna Korteweg is co-editor of the journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society and co-convener of the Immigration Research Network of the Council for European Studies.