Welcome Message and 2009 Updates from the Co-ordinator

Dear Citizenship and Migration CRN Members:

As the new academic year gets underway (at least for those of us in North America), I wanted to write a short welcome note addressed to both the new and longtime members of our Law and Society Association Citizenship and Immigration CRN. It was nice to see many of you at the 2009 conference in Denver and a warm welcome to new members!

First of all, thanks to everyone who attended the conference in Denver, and especially to those who organized panels on immigration and citizenship topics. We did not hold a formal business meeting in Denver, but we did hold an informal social hour on Friday evening.

A special thanks to Kitty Calavita and to Jonathan Klaaren for expertly moderating the CRN-organized "Roundtable on Immigrant Rights" that brought together several dozen participants on Thursday afternoon of the conference to hear about each other’s work and to talk about immigration law and policy in different national contexts. The panel received an enthusiastic response, and it might be nice to explore planning something similar for the 2010 conference in Chicago. If you have ideas, or would like to help with planning, please let me know.

Also at the Denver LSA meeting, we were treated to a "Roundtable on Immigration and Communities" organized by Susan Sterett that included immigrant rights advocates from the Denver area. At our CRN meetings, we have been talking for some time about organizing this type of panel featuring practitioners and local advocates from the community in which the conference is held. This may be something that we could organize again at the 2010 meeting in Chicago. Please contact me if you would like to be involved in the planning.

This year, I am taking over as coordinator of the CRN from Liz Boyle, who served as coordinator for the past two years. Thanks very much to Liz for having been willing to take on the role of CRN coordinator in addition to her many other commitments and for setting a high standard for future coordinators to follow.

Happily, and thanks to Jeff Handmaker, the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague will continue to host our website and email listserve. Jeff sent an email in June asking that you update (or create) your bio on the website. As you can see from the website, we now have quite a list of CRN member bios, and we are always happy to have more. The CRN website also contains a section where immigration and citizenship course syllabi are posted. If you teach in this area, please do send your syllabus to Jeff so that we can post it. It would be great to build up this area of the website. You can e-mail Jeff here.

The 2010 Law & Society Association Annual Meeting will take place in Chicago from May 27-30. Submissions are due 8 December 2009. This year, through felicitous planning, the biennial Immigration Law Teachers Workshop, which Hiroshi Motomura is organizing, will take place in Chicago at DePaul University Law School on the Tuesday and Wednesday prior to the LSA conference. Although the two events are not formally connected, I’m sure that some CRN members will be interested in attending both. Hiroshi has promised to send more information about the workshop to the listserve when the plans are finalized.

For the past several years, we have been working to avoid scheduling migration-related panels at the same time. It seems that one way to do this would be for everyone who organizes this type of panel to mark the submission as being sponsored by our CRN (to do this, you simply add [CRN2] at the end of the proposed title of your panel as you are submitting it through the LSA electronic submission process). There is no limit to the number of panels that CRN’s can sponsor at LSA meetings, and the advantage of sponsorship is that panels that are submitted with the CRN affiliation will not be scheduled at overlapping time slots. If you are interested in having the CRN sponsor your panel, please send an email to the listserve prior to making your final panel submission. This will just give us notice that you are organizing a panel for which CRN sponsorship makes sense. In general, I would like to encourage everyone to take advantage of the listserve in coordinating panel and paper submissions and collaborations.

I’d also like to encourage everyone to send immigration-related conference announcements and job/fellowship postings to the listserve.

Finally, I’ve asked Liz Boyle and Susan Coutin (both of whom have previously served as coordinator of this CRN) to put together a list of nominees to take over as the next CRN coordinator. I expect we will be able to send more information about that process in the late spring.

Best wishes for the 2009-2010 academic year!

Yours,

Leila

Citizenship and Migration CRN Coordinator
Assistant Professor of Politics
Bates College
Lewiston, Maine, USA