Call for Papers: Race & Immigration in the American City. Deadline Friday, March 25, 2011

Theme:
“Race and Immigration in the American City:
New Perspectives on 21st century Intergroup Relations”

University of Chicago
Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture

Conference Date:
May 20, 2011

Keynote speaker:
Professor Jennifer Lee, Sociology Dept., University of California, Irvine.

“Race and Immigration in the American City” seeks to explore themes of intergroup dynamics within multi-racial and multi-ethnic contexts across a range of urban arenas. As the post-1964 immigration wave has transformed the face of American cities, these new polyglot demographics introduce new forms, experiences, and dynamics of intergroup relations. How newcomers “fit into” contemporary contexts of urban daily life, how current residents receive them, and how structural factors may influence these encounters prompt a number of avenues of analytic examination that help shed light on our contemporary experience of race and immigration in the American city.

Conference papers might explore:

• Other dimensions of difference that mediate race and nativity, such as gender or class;
  
• the ways in which new configurations of racial and ethnic inequality have emerged in multiracial contexts;
  
• The ways in which new arrivals and/or prior residents adapt, contest, and reshape the experience of “race” in America;
  
• New forms of collaboration between groups; the persistence or shift in the “color line” given the ethnoracial diversity of contemporary urban demographics.
  

Substantively, they are interested in any number of topics that examine the contemporary urban condition such as employment, housing, neighborhood change, local politics, and socialmobilization. Methodologically, the conference will emphasize comparative
rather than group-specific research.

Paper proposals of two (2) pages maximum, plus a two (2) page curriculum vitae should be sent to Virginia Parks vparks@uchicago.edu and Ramón Gutiérrez rgutierrez@uchicago.edu by Friday, March 25, 2011.