Centering the concept of social reproduction, and disaggregating it into symbolic, material, and affective components, professor Korteweg will show how each plays a critical role in public responses to women’s rights claims. Media discourses create a gendered, racialized, and class-based conceptualization of citizenship unattainable to those whose social reproductive labour as mothers and wives, as well as their own social reproduction as daughters, is deemed a threat to the nation-state. Seeing the revocation-rehabilitation continuum through the lens of social reproduction clarifies how citizenship revocation can potentially be understood as a contemporary articulation of a form of eugenics in European migration societies. 

About the speaker

Anna C. Korteweg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto (PhD, Sociology, University of California Berkeley, 2004). Her research focuses on the ways in which the perceived problems of immigrant integration are constructed in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity, and national origin. From this critical vantage point, she has published extensively on debates surrounding the wearing of the headscarf, so-called “honour-based” violence, and Sharia law.

Her current projects look at the return of women who joined ISIS to their European home countries, the co-construction of borders and subjectivity in LGBTQ+ refugee politics, and the citizenship implications of refugee sponsorship in Canada. Professor Korteweg also focuses on creative avenues for communicating ideas, including digital storytelling and podcasting.

Professor Korteweg has published the two monographs: The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford University Press 2014, with Gökçe Yurdakul); Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (edited with Jennifer Selby, University of Toronto Press 2012). In addition, she has published 29 articles in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, as well as numerous book chapters and non-peer reviewed materials.

Her research has been funded by multiple SSHRC grants and funding from the DAAD and CERIS. Anna Korteweg is co-editor of the journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society and co-convener of the Immigration Research Network of the Council for European Studies.