Political Science
2010 Rothman Faculty Summer Fellowship
Ana Margheritis spent the summer of 2010 in Spain and France researching the changing identity of Argentinean and Ecuadorian immigrants to Southern Europe with the support of a Rothman Faculty Summer Fellowship. Her research interests focus on the political dimension of transnational migration. Building upon previous work on state-led transnationalism, she is studying the construction and evolution of national identity among South American emigrants. She is endeavoring to understand how the conditions and causes of emigration affect people’s ideas of nation, home, and belonging, as well as the impact of state institutions and policies on such questions.
Specifically, she seeks to understand policies that Latin American nation-states have recently implemented in order to reach out to their diasporas, and responses on the part of the immigrants to Europe through associational life and political mobilization. In order to research these migration issues, she spent three weeks as a visiting researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in the Juan March Institute in Madrid and conducted several interviews with immigrants and specialists on these issues. She also attended the Fifth-Pan European Conference, held in Porto in late June, where she presented her research and chaired a panel on the EU’s asylum policies. Finally, she spent three weeks as visiting scholar at CERI, within Sciences Po, in Paris.
In the future, she hopes to travel again to Spain in order to conduct further research and interviews with South American immigrants outside of Madrid, as well as several cities in Italy.