Moving Across Europe as Non-Europeans
Meso-level Analyses of Mobility Regimes in the 20th and 21st Centuries
6.07.2026 – 7.07.2026
14:45 – 16:30
Friedrichstraße 191, 10117 Berlin, Tillion Room, 7th floor
This workshop brings together historians, political scientists, and social scientists to explore the history and politics of mobility within Europe through a long-term perspective, focusing on groups that have been categorized or perceived as “non-European”. Spanning the early twentieth century to the present, it examines how changing historical and geopolitical contexts have shaped mobility, belonging, and membership in Europe. By adopting a longue durée perspective, the workshop seeks both to better understand the emergence of contemporary European mobility and membership regimes and to advance the conceptualization of mobility regimes as embedded, co-produced, politically contested, and socially productive. Particular attention is given to the meso-level: the institutions, organizations, infrastructures, and intermediary actors through which mobility is governed, negotiated, and transformed in practice.
Organised by Giulia Scalettaris & Lucie Lamy
Programm
2:45 PM–3:15 PM
Introduction by the organizers, Giulia Scalettaris (Centre Marc Bloch – CMB) and Lucie Lamy (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam – ZZF)
3:15PM–5:15PM
Session 1 – Mobility and Exclusion in the First Half of the 20th Century: Drawing the Boundaries of European Societies at City Scale
Adèle Sutre (Institut Convergences Migrations, CNRS) – Mobility Regimes of Romani Family Groups Around the World (1880–1960): Between Movement and Settlement
Julia Harnoncourt (University of Graz) – Performing Europe: Non-European Artists, Moral Implications and Mobility Regimes in Interwar Luxembourg
Discussant: Christina Reimann (Humboldt University Berlin / CMB)
8:30AM–10:30AM
Session 2 – Cold War Europe and the ‘Third World’: Non-Europeans at Western Universities
Henry Dee (Northumbria University) – The political economy of diverging intra- and extra-European student mobility, 1960s-1990s
Lucie Lamy (ZZF) – Students, Refugees or Migrants? How African and Asian students’ cross-bloc mobility challenged the West German Cold War order and migration categories in the 1960s
Discussant: Guillaume Placide-Breitenbucher (Strasbourg University / CMB)
Session 3 – The Origins of Fortress Europe: German(ies) as a Laboratory of the Schengen System Beyond the Caesura of 1990
Ned Richardson-Little (ZZF) – The Globalization of the Narcotics Trade on the Borders of German(ies) and the Rise of Fortress Europe
Lennart Vincent Schmidt (ZZF) – From Registry to Regime: Digital Infrastructures and the Governance of Non-Europeans in Postwar Europe
Discussant: Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş (ZZF)
Session 4 – Negotiating the Borders of Europe: Non-State Actors and Migrant Networks in Turkey and Italy
Emilio Caja (University of Lisboa) – The ghetto and the errants. The circular mobilities of legally precarious West African migrants across Europe
Alexander Ephrussi (CMB) – Acting out the Citizen: Humanitarianism on Unsteady Ground
