“Temporary” Labor Migration, Difference, and Inequality in Cold War Western Europe

Perceiving migration as a process through which social categories and relations are continuously renegotiated, this Conference seeks to foreground the relational, intersectional, and changing character of “temporary” labor migrants’ experiences in Western Europe during the Cold War. Rather than treating immigrant populations as homogeneous and unchanging national or social entities, it approaches migration as a field of differentiation, negotiation, and contestation in which multiple axes of power and inequality intersect and acquire new meanings over time.