Citizenship and Immigrant Incorporation ― Comparative Perspectives on North America and Western Europe

In recent years, scholarly attention has shifted away from debates on ethnicity to focus on issues of migration and citizenship. Inspired, in part, by earlier studies on European guestworker migration, these debates are fed by the new "transnational mobility", by the immigration of Muslims, by the increasing importance of human rights law, and by the critical attention now paid to women migrants. With respect to citizenship, many discussions address the diverse citizenship regimes. The present volume, together with its predecessor (Bodemann and Yurdakul 2006), addresses these often contentious issues. A common denominator which unites the various contributions is the question of migrant agency, in other words, the ways in which Western societies are not only transforming migrants, but are themselves being transformed by new migrations.

Gokce Yurdakul is Assistant Professor in the department of sociology at Brock University, Canada. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, Mobilizing Kreuzberg: Political Representation, Immigrant Incorporation and Turkish Associations in Berlin, compares five immigrant associations and their claims for political representation in Germany. Her teaching and research interests include migration, citizenship, race and ethnicity, gender, and women. She has published in edited books and academic journals, such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, German Politics and Society and Soziale Welt. She is currently doing research on how Turkish immigrants and Jews relate to one another in the German diaspora.
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Michal Bodemann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Today, his areas of research and teaching include race and ethnic relations, classical sociological theory, qualitative methods, Jewish studies, and especially German-Jewish relations and memory. He has published numerous articles and books on Jews in Germany, notably his book, Gedachnistheater. Die judische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung, (Theatre of Memory. The Jewish Community and its German Invention, 1996). He is conducting further research on Jews in contemporary Germany. His most recent monograph is A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (Duke University Press, 2004). Gokce Yurdakul and Michal Bodemann are the editors of Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).