Peggy Levitt, professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, and Fellow at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations at Harvard University, presents the spring Journal of Anthropological Research distinguished lecture.

Titled “Immigration: Images, Icons, and Institutions. The Politics and Poetics of Creating the Global,” Levitt's lecture is Thursday, Feb. 25 at 7:30 p.m. in the UNM Anthropology Lecture Hall (Rm. 163.).

Her talk looks at sites around the world where cosmopolitan ideas and skills are created, with a particular focus on museums, and asks what it is about certain cities and nations that helps explain why museums represent diversity and respond to immigration so differently?

“We live in a world on the move. Nearly one in seven people in the world today is an internal or international migrant," Levitt said. "These dynamics challenge basic assumptions about how and where inequality is produced, family life gets lived, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled. They raise questions about the new kinds of social safety nets and institutions that are needed to respond to people’s mobile lives. And they require us to find new strategies for instilling the willingness and skills to engage with difference across the world and across the street.”

In this talk she will also explore if and how new global canons are being created, by whom, and for whom? She asks why the work of some authors becomes part of “world literature” while others remain national? She will also look at new forms of global social protection.  In this world of widespread voluntary and forced migration, how are people protected and provided for outside the traditional framework of the nation-state? 

Levitt will also present a specialized seminar “Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums put the Nation and the World on display” on Friday, Feb. 26 at noon in Anthropology Building, Room 248.

Both events are free and the public is welcome. Both venues are wheelchair accessible and metered parking is available.

Both events are sponsored by the “Journal of Anthropological Research,” which has been published quarterly by the University of New Mexico in the interest of general anthropology since 1945. Production and distribution is now handled by the University of Chicago Press. Subscriptions are available at this website, or by calling the journal office at (505) 277-4544.