Cicilie among the Parisians

I wasn’t selected for the quantitative methods workshop in Paris. Not so strange perhaps, since there is hardly any counting in my work… However, the competition was far fiercer for the other European Science Foundation happening I applied for, and there they wanted me (out of more than 260 abstracts :-) ) Paris is slightly more enticing that Linköping, that is so, and it would probably have been a very good learning experience one way or the other to hear more about how to study “discrimination” and particularly “integration” quantitatively (which is quite hard for us qualitatively focused people to see). And, not least, one of the organisers, Patrick Simon, has done a lot of work on Belleville. It would have been an excellent opportunity to network a little.

I’ve realised that networking, whether I like it or not – which happens to be the case – is an important part of this game. One comes nowhere without networks, a fact I learnt after I got a ridiculously meagre response to a workshop I tried to organise recently. And one day I’ll be finished at my old university, and that day is approaching faster than I like to think of. Home Migration and the City: New Narratives, New Methodologies in Linköping will also be an excellent place to start. From the program, I see that people come from all over the world, and it looks extremely interesting. I’m very much looking forward to going and I’ve already booked the trip. (It will be quite an adventurous journey it seems, as it’s almost as difficult to travel by train from Oslo to neighbouring capital Stockholm as it is between Thessalonica and Istanbul…).

The title of my paper is “Cosmopolitan space, place and notions of nation: Narratives of migration in Parisian performance poetry”, and I will look at how certain stories performed at the slam soirées play a key role in creating the cosmopolitan character of the sessions. Now, it’s just to get time to write it…