Nina Schiller

Research Themes: Transnational migration, cities, globalization, locality, religion and migration, methodological nationalism

Nina Glick Schiller is the Director of the Cosmopolitan Cultures Institute and Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Professor. She is an associate of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale Germany and a senior associate of the Max Planck Institute for Ethnic and Religious Diversity, and Emiritus Professor of Anthropology at University of New Hampshire, USA. In her articles, chapters, reports and books Nina Glick Schiller has developed a comparative and historical perspective on migration, transnational and diasporic processes, and social relations. Her current research interests include the relationships between migrants and cities, the transnationality of cities, diasporic cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitan sociability. Glick Schillers research has been conducted in Haiti, the United States, and Germany and she has worked with migrants from all regions of the globe. She is currently engaged in research projects in Manchester UK and Copenhagen, Denmark. She has also critiqued research paradigms and methodological nationalist orientations in migration, urban and health studies.

In migration and urban studies, her concern has been to explore differences of power within transnational social fields in relationship to the constitution of gender, race, class, status, poverty, the second generation, citizenship, and national identity. To foster publication from this perspective in 1992 she is the founding editor of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. She is currently also on the boards of Social Analysis, Anthropological Theory, African Diaspora, and Focaal.

Her recent book projects continue to develop migration theory by contesting the methodological nationalism of most migration studies. They question the comparative framework that remains fixed in an analysis of individual nation-states and state policies. Locating Migration: Rescaling Migrants and Cities, co-edited with Ayse Caglar, (Cornell, 2011 ) [available Nov 2010] examines the relationships between the scalar positioning of cities and the pathways of migrant transnationality. Migration, Development and Transnationalization: A Critical Stance, co-edited with Thomas Faist, (Berghahn Books) questions the celebration of migrants as agents of development.