DeZIM_talk | with Prof. Myra Marx Ferree and Prof. Ilse Lenz

Political Demography: Family Change and Contemporary Gender and Immigration Politics

Monday, 15th July 2024, 06:00 – 08:00 pm,
DeZIM.Saal, 3. OG,  Mauerstr. 76,
10117 Berlin 

The event will be held in English. 

Political Demography: Family Change and Contemporary Gender and Immigration Politics

On July 15th 2024, DeZIM hosted a talk by Prof. Myra Marx Ferree on “Political Demography: Family Change and Contemporary Gender and Immigration Politics”. After two welcome remarks by co-hosts Prof. Gökce Yurdakul (HU Berlin) and Prof. Kathrin Zippel (FU Berlin), Marx Ferree advanced the concept of political demography as a complement to the concept of the political economy in order to emphasize the nation-state as a hybrid concept, with both the nation and the state as resting on particular institutional footings.

While the political economy emphasizes the state’s relation to institutions of production of goods and services, she argued that political demography stresses the nation’s relationship to the families and communities that secure reproduction, not only of the physical bodies of the new generation but in reproducing a societal sense of identity and belonging. In her view, families as lived and the changing understanding of family as an institution are respectively the material and cultural bedrock of political demography. Accordingly, membership in a nation (citizenship) as well as in a gender reflect battles over the political relations of “belongingness” expressed in both immigration and transgender politics. 

Material changes in the lived experience of families and cultural changes in the institutional legitimacy of family as the root of the nation and the seat of gendered difference are today key factors contributing to polarizing voters, political parties, and states.  The parties of the “new left” and “new right” are more responsive to the ongoing changes of political demography than to the conventional political-economy division of left and right.

The “new right” resistance to pluralism in the nation and to de-gendering reproductive relations faces off against a “new left” expansion of democratic values and decision-making processes that challenge nationalism-as-usual. Like the differences and changes in capitalism that scholars of the political economy have emphasized, Marx Ferree concluded, there is crucial variation among countries, generations, and religions in how the material and cultural conditions of their reproduction shape their politics. Both immigration and gender, as explicit political issues, are inseparably linked in the political demography on which both rest and which offers rich targets for change to both sides.   

In her discussion, Prof. Ilse Lenz praised the innovative potential of Marx Ferree’s perspective bridging various disciplines including gender studies, demography, and political sociology. In the subsequent Q&A moderated by Dr. Seyran Bostancı (DeZIM Institute), various comments from the large international academic audience centered around the transferability of Marx Ferree’s notion of political demography to contexts outside the Western hemisphere including the Philippines, Japan and China. Given the timeliness of the talk, discussions continued during the reception following the talk. 

Program

6:00 – 6:10 pm: Welcome and Introduction by Prof. Kathrin Zippel and Prof. Gökce Yurdakul  
6:10 – 7:00 pm: Keynote by Prof. Myra Marx Ferree 

7:00 – 7:10 pm: Commentary by Prof. Ilse Lenz  

7:10 – 7:30 pm: Moderated Discussion  

7:30 – 8:00 pm: conclusion and farewell with drinks

Moderation: Dr. Seyran Bostancı 

Our Guests:

Organizers

The event is Co-Sponsored by: Einstein Professor Kathrin Zippel, Research Unit Gender Studies,Institute of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin  

In cooperation with the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM).