1-2 April 2008

At a time in which international migration movements occupy an important place in Europe's political and social agenda, carrying out an examination of the specific features of Asian migrations and their settling in Europe is a revealing exercise. Focusing particularly on the economic dimension of Asian immigration and on the transnational elements that characterise it, this seminar is an attempt to bring together contributions from experts from different locations in Mediterranean Europe. It is hoped that the results will help to develop an area of study that has been particularly prolific in the English-speaking world, and which is especially useful in terms of the management of immigration as well as for exploring new channels for the internationalisation of society and the economy.

2, 3 and 4 April

In view of the growing interest in the audiovisual medium in the field of social research, in this workshop, the Doctorate Students' Forum proposes to examine the dialogic process of the construction of cultural meanings, a process in which anthropologists and social actors jointly participate. To stimulate the discussion, there will be a screening of three documentary films made in Venezuela by members of the UB School of Anthropology.

3-5 April 2008

The seminar Tourism, heritages, identities and territories uses a selection of papers that have as their central theme a reflection on the notion of territory and its links with tourism, heritage and identity, in an attempt to broaden perceptions of the concept of territory and to redefine it according to its implications for the areas of tourism, sustainable development and the processes for the reconstruction of identity. Specifically, the seminar examines the question as to whether nowadays, at a time in which mobility is having an unprecedented effect on tourism, the re-evaluation of the territory as a space of social identification and an area for development could turn into a source of conflict or, in contrast, one of social and economic progress.

7-8 April

The CIDOB Foundation's Mediterranean Programme is organising the final seminar in the research project directed by Ferran Izquierdo, Lecturer in International Relations at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), on the subject of whether political transitions are currently taking place in the Arab world. The seminar will include a presentation of the theoretical-analytical framework on which the project was based, and there will be discussions of nine case studies (each one corresponding to a different country in the Arab world). The studies will analyse the structural factors of the power system and examine the role of the elites, the opposition movements, the system's response to these demands and prospects for future change. Each case study will be presented by the researchers responsible for the work, and an academic of international renown will discuss their findings.

Presentation and discussion of the research study The judiciary as a new political actor in Latin America by Elena Martínez Barahona, Assistant Lecturer and Ph.D. in the area of Political Science and researcher at the Inter-university Institute of Ibero-American Studies at the University of Salamanca. The aim of the work is to analyse the different forms that the phenomenon of the "judicialisation of politics" is taking in the Latin American context, where judges are increasingly becoming situated at the centre of the political panorama, thereby causing democratic legitimacy to be relocated, to a certain extent, from the political system to the judicial system.

16-18 April 2008

By examining what it is that border interstices express and contain (and which are articulated in a multiplicity of ways of experiencing and viewing identity and cultural matters from an everyday standpoint) we can find a space for coexisting (or not) in the cross-border space with "others".

Meanwhile, beyond the "imagined border" (where very often the condition of border is exhausted or simply disappears), emerges the raw, dramatised side of border realities, with their main functions: separating-differentiating-segregating-delimiting. This dual capacity of borders and their spaces, whether they are imagined or real, which gives them their condition of encounter and disagreement, of coexistence and intolerance, of peace or war - in short, shouldn't we ask ourselves, aren't there other ways of viewing and interpreting the identity and cultural matters in the cross-border space? This is the subject we will be examining today.