Migration continues to radically rearrange the makeup of populations all over the world. Migrants are often very different than native populations—in language, religion and culture. The Baltic region and Eastern Europe, as well as Europe more generally, struggle with the effects of demographic transformations. The value of ‘multicultural’ policies is often questioned. Citizenship policies are restrictive and often ethnically based. Despite labor shortages looming in many countries, official polices towards migration are changing only slowly.
This conference will study the impact of both population decline and population growth on countries, economies, and cultures local and global, with the express purpose of placing these phenomena and their repercussions in conversation. For example, in Lithuania an effective (rather than tragic) response to population loss may absolutely demand learning lessons from the impact of immigrants—including especially the multicultural dimensions—on their new countries. Simple but powerful questions for the conference to address include: how to approach the tension between one of the EU’s key selling points—high mobility—and the frustration of many in the EU on both sides of the mobility equation; additionally, for those countries dropping in population due to significant emigration numbers, is asking how to get our citizens back the best question, or should the question rather be how to create new citizens? And who is ‘us ’ and ‘them’; who is a ‘citizen’ in these formulations in the first place?
Most scholars seem to agree that emigration creates problems and potential opportunities; but there is widespread disagreement about the precise nature of those problems. Highly partisan public debates create a false sense of simplicity, as if these issues were merely a matter of us versus them, friend versus enemy. This apparent simplicity hinders more productive conversation, charitable disagreement, and thoughtful, informed understanding of the otherwise complicated, nuanced interrelationship of demographic change, multiculturalism, and citizenship issues. LCC’s 2014 academic conference brings together scholars from Lithuania, across Europe and beyond, to present research, promote conversation, generate new questions, and rigorously reflect on the complex issues generated by the constellation of concepts: demographics, multiculturalism, citizenship.
To further promote engaged conversation among all conference participants, the conference program will consist not only of typical presentation panels and several plenary lectures; the program will also feature open roundtable discussions to engage the audience, presenters, and invited experts and noted scholars. The conference organizers welcome papers from across the academic disciplines. The language of the conference is English. Presentations will be twenty minutes in length, with an additional ten minutes allocated for questions and discussion.
Deadline for Abstracts: March 14, 2014
For Abstract Submission Guidelines, please see:
LCC International University
(tel.) +370 46 24 13 63
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