Newly appointed Professors from our Department of Sociology

Professor Renee Luthra, Department of Sociology

From Origins to Destinations: Understanding the Lives of Immigrants and their Children

High levels of immigration in many rich countries has dramatically increased their demographic and socioeconomic diversity, with lasting intergenerational effects: currently more than one in four children under the age of 18 in the UK has at least one foreign born parent. The experience of migration alters an immigrant’s work, family, and social life; these changes affect their children as well. To understand the lives of immigrants and their descendants, we therefore need a unique perspective that takes the migration process into account, and also accounts for the influence of socialisation processes and experiences in their sending countries. This lecture will review research that applies this perspective, highlighting key questions about the role of sending country experiences, the migration process, exposure to discrimination and the receiving country education and labour market in shaping the lives of immigrants in the UK and abroad.

Professor Luthra is Director of the Essex Centre for Migration Studies and Assistant Director, ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change.

Renee Luthra is a sociologist with expertise in international migration, social stratification, education, and quantitative methods and her current research interests include migration and inequalities in parenting, education, work and health.

Professor Sandya Hewamanne, Department of Sociology

Transnationalism, Neoliberalism and Fluid Identities

My work, overall, has focused on how marginalized individuals and communities negotiate everyday life in ways that are meaningful to them and in the process shape and stretch boundaries and structures that constrain. It analyzes how such negotiations happen within intertwined social realities of neoliberalism and transnationalism--starting with global assembly line workers in Sri Lanka and extending to similar processes in the Global South. This lecture will focus on this intellectual journey.

Sandya Hewamanne is Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Centre for Global South Studies at the University of Essex. She is the author of Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone and Re-stitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: University of Pennsylvania Press (2008); Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers: (Un)Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles, Routledge (2016); Gender, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Contentment, University of Pennsylvania Press (2020) and the co-editor of The Political Economy of Post-COVID Life and Work in the Global South: Pandemic and Precarity (Springer 2022). She is the Founder, Director of IMPACT-Global Work, a non-profit which connects academics and activists to initiate positive policy changes for workers in the Global South. She is the Vice-President of American Institute of Sri Lanka Studies (AlSLS).

Please note the venue for this event has changed and it will now take place in STEM 3.1, off square 1. 

Please join us for a drinks reception in the STEM Centre following the event.

Tickets

Admission is free to this event and open to all but a seat must be reserved via Eventbrite (or by sending an email to events@essex.ac.uk or telephoning 01206 873270) in advance. This event will be live-streamed and you can select a virtual viewing ticket on Eventbrite and we will send you the link to the live-stream (YouTube) in advance.