Nearly one billion people, or roughly one out of every seven people in the world today, are internal or international migrants who move by force or by choice, with great success or great struggle. At the same time, the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union, President Trump's militarization of the U.S and Mexican border, and the rise of the far right in many parts of the world reflect heightened nationalism and xenophobia and increased efforts to thwart mobility, especially among refugees, the poor and unskilled.

These dynamics challenge long-standing assumptions about how people live and work and about how social institutions function, what categories such as "development",  "social inclusion", and "Global South" actually mean, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled. Much of mainstream scholarship on migration, race, and ethnicity is off key because it still relies unreflexively on old categories, without considering their intellectual genealogies or the assumptions about space, scale, and values upon which they are based.  It still takes the nation as a bounded, rooted space rather than exploring the ways in which the national and the transnational are co-produced.

Cultural inequality are part and parcel of socioeconomic inequality. We won't do better at addressing economic inequality if we don't confront cultural inequality as well. This talk explores the possibilities for different, more inclusive ways of creating, disseminating, and acting upon knowledge. So many interventions stop at critique without charting a path forward. How can we pledge to reconstruct as well as deconstruct?