IMER Congress

IMER stands for International Migration and Ethnic Relations. This field of study is interdisciplinary, with ethnologists, sociologists, social work scientists and human geographers amongst the interested. Botkyrka, a Stockholm suburb, hosts a multicultural centre where the Swedish IMER Society has its seat. A congress was arranged by them on the last day of January and the first day of February 2008.
It was my first congress outside Örebro and I was curious to see what the multicultural centre looked like and what kind of people there would be. It was a nice old building amidst the concrete suburbian flats, where we - a group of about 25 people - discussed IMER for two days. The group was mixed in age, gender and ethnic backgrounds. Young "ethnic" PhD candidates like myself (Dutch, Polish and other nationalities) were sitting side by side with experienced researchers from England, India, Denmark, Iceland, Turkey and of course Sweden.
We talked about diaspora, bilingual children and what it's like to be a "suburb-kid". Very interesting and it resulted in a nice idea for taking part in an IMER Seminar series at Uppsala University, amongst other things.
Completely exhausted, but many experiences richer, I returned to Örebro.

The end of the first course

It's been a while, but I'll summarise the first course and the final two seminars we had in October and November 2007. The fourth seminar was interesting and exciting, as PhD student MJ presented his work on Experience Economy in Bergslagen (Avesta) and connected this to the work of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation. In the restructuring areas of Sweden, new efforts are made to focus on the value of experience industries. Film in Göteborg, Food in Hällefors and so on. Special meeting places are founded and funded with many millions of crowns! What it all comes down to is that life is all about experiences. We discussed the effects this has on planning and local creativity.

This was linked to theories and literature by Allen J. Scott (The cultural economy of cities) and Scott & Dominic Power (the production of culture).

The fifth and final seminar took place on 8 November and here we discussed each other's essays. Everyone had read one of the other texts in particular and was supposed to discuss them in general for about 20 minutes. I wrote my essay about the value of theories of urbanism in the context of Dutch migration to Swedish rural areas. Other topics were: New Urban Politics (ALF), the concept "Networks" (AT), The late-modern city (MH), Social polarisation and immigrants (ML), New urban forms (PS) and Consumption, choice and place (SL). We realise now that our little group is all about studying identity!