(Re)Constructing Identity: Diaspora Diplomacy

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(Re)Constructing Identity: Diaspora Diplomacy

November 19, 2021

(Re)Constructing Identity: Diaspora Diplomacy is the second day of a four-day research summit, Players: We are all Practitioners, organized by NACDI and hosted virtually by the University of Southern California.

Keynote- “Mexican Diasporas in the United States: Tools for Engagement that Center Community Knowledges and Experiences“
9:00 am – 10:15 (PT)/11:00 – 12:15 (CT)/12:00 pm – 1:15 (ET)

Speaker: Alexandra Delano Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies, the New School, New York City
Chair: César Villanueva Rivas Associate Professor of International Relations and Public/Cultural Diplomacy, Universidad Iberoamericana

Since the mid 19th century, Mexican migrants in the United States have organized through mutual aid groups, community organizations and cultural programs. With multiple objectives and motivations, from celebrating and sharing cultural traditions across borders and across generations, to maintaining ties with and supporting their communities of origin, or making claims for political rights in Mexico and the United States, they create spaces for cross-border dialogues and engagement with multiple actors in both countries, challenging the fixed territorial boundaries of categories of citizenship and access to rights. In this presentation I focus on the history of engagement between different groups in the Mexican diaspora and the Mexican state, emphasizing practices of engagement that build from knowledges and experiences of the community, considering the opportunities that arise from them as spaces for new imaginaries and political horizons, as well as their tensions and limitations.

Panel 1- Remembering and Engaging: Diaspora Museums as Cultural Diplomacy
10:30 am – 11:45 am (PT)/12:30 – 1:45 (CT)/1:30 pm – 2:45 (ET)

**Click here to read a blog post about this past discussion**

Moderators:

Sascha Priewe, Associate Vice President, Strategic Planning and Partnerships, Royal Ontario Museum
Simge Erdogan-O’Connor, Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, Queen’s University, Research Fellow, NACDI

Panelists:

Adán B.F. García, Academic Chair, Memory and Tolerance Museum, Mexico City
Palina Louangketh, Founder & Executive Director, Idaho Museum of International Diaspora
Grace Wong, Board Chair, Chinese Canadian Museum Society of British Columbia
Ulrike Al-Khamis, Director & CEO of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

Museums are increasingly recognized as diplomatic players in their own right. Associated with cultural diplomacy activities and foreign policy agendas of the nation states they are located in, museums have long played a role in global cultural relations through their exhibitions, collecting and research activities. Museums are also active in globe-spanning professional networks. They are increasingly shaping their global engagement activities through the lens of their own agendas, priorities and principles, rather than being simply subsumed under a nation-state driven soft power paradigm. This session seeks to explore 21^st century museum agendas by foregrounding diaspora museums, museums that sit at the intersection between the heritage of the host population and the inheritance of the source country.

Museums are important platforms to promote a nation, a people or a culture, and are being harnessed by diaspora and other communities as vehicles to channel their cultural and national expressions, histories and location. This session will address the role of diaspora museums at the junction between the local and the global alongside their negotiation of identities. Additionally, the session will also consider in what ways museum projects are deemed diplomatic activities, as well as how their activities are affected by the increasing push among other museums to include diaspora and diverse voices and representations.

Panel 2- Flipping the Script: Bottom-Up Methods for Diaspora Diplomacy Studies
12:00 noon – 1:15 pm (PT)/2:00 pm – 3:15 (CT)/3:00 pm – 4:15 (ET)

Moderator:

Eduardo Luciano Tadeo Hernández, Adjunct Professor, International Studies, Universidad Iberoamericana

Panelists:

Vanessa Bravo, Associate Professor of Strategic Communications and Chair of the Department of Strategic Communications, Elon University
Maria DeMoya, Associate Professor, Program Chair – Public Relations and Advertising, DePaul University
Alina Dolea, Principal Academic in Media, Communication & Politics, Bournemouth University
Ilan Manor, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Communications, Tel Aviv University

Diaspora studies offer a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the movement and transnational settlement of people. The dispersion of populations across borders and the construction of an identity as a distinct community, which invokes in many cases connections to the homeland and reconfigured relations to the host country, has existed throughout history. However, in our globalized age, the phenomena of communities that maintain transnational connections have become more prevalent. As the field evolves, the methodological toolkit for its study is expanding to encompass the proliferation of meanings and applications. Diaspora diplomacy scholars are engaging with new forms of understanding diasporas as communities that are constantly negotiating and constituting their identity. We continue to recognize the fluidity of the ethnicity category that relies on social practices. In that process, it is important to give more attention to the power dynamics that ultimately converge in the diaspora.

In reflecting on the opportunities for a deeper engagement with the communities, new methods for diaspora diplomacy studies would enable scholars and practitioners to better align themselves with stakeholders and to articulate the changes in practice needed to serve an increasingly transnational public. This session brings together scholars working in the cultural aspects of diaspora studies and whose work outside of North America has relevance in grasping the diversity of the communities.

Panel 3- The Scholar as Diplomat: Diaspora intellectuals and (Cross)Community Representation.
1:30pm – 2:45 pm (PT)/3:30 pm – 3:45 (CT)/4:30 pm – 5:45 (ET)

Moderator:

Nicholas J. Cull, Professor of Communication and Global Communication Policy Fellow, Center for Communication, Leadership, and Policy, University of Southern California

Panelists:

John Bieter, Professor, History Department, Boise State University
Salpi Ghazarian, Director, USC Armenian Studies Institute
Yael Siman, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad Iberoamericana

Diaspora diplomacy is a rich academic field as well as a vibrant space for activism. Diasporas play important roles such as building and nurturing relations between their host country and their homelands and assisting in the democratization processes of the latter. Furthermore, they can create solidarity groups with other diasporas, increasing organized mobilizations and establishing wider networks of support that acquire economic and political resources to affect the structure of the host country, allowing claims and demands in the public sphere. With increased access to information and communication technologies (ICT’s), such associations can become more diverse and open the path to new forms of organization, calling for new models of practice.

Diaspora communities form g/local networks of relations and hybridized visions of nation which challenge the primacy of state-centric diplomacy. The Scholar as Diplomat session will bring together scholars of diaspora to consider the evolution of individual diasporas and their interaction including the emergence of reciprocal campaigns.