Migration Control and Access to Welfare

Join us for this book launch at Bergen Global (Jekteviksbakken 31) or

participate via Zoom

In this seminar
Marry-Anne Karlsen, in collaboration with the
Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), will present her new book ‘Migration Control and Access to Welfare: The Precarious Inclusion of Irregular Migrants in Norway’.

The book draws on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Norway and sheds light on ambiguities in the state’s response to irregular migration that simultaneously cut through law, policy, and practice.

Carefully examining the complex interplay between the geopolitical management of territory and the biopolitical management of populations, the book argues that irregularized migrants should be understood as precariously included in the welfare state rather than simply excluded.

In the seminar,
Christine Jacobsen will have a conversation will Karlsen on her book.

The book is open access (external link)

There will be mingling afterwards, and drinks will be provided.

Marry-Anne Karlsen is a researcher at Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK). She has a background in human geography and social anthropology. Her research interests cover migration, the welfare state, and border politics. She is currently part of an international research project funded by the RCN, Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration (WAIT).

Karlsen is also involved in TemPro, another RCN-funded project lead by CMI senior researcher Jessica Schultz, and PROTECT, an EU funded project lead by Hakan G. Sicakkan at the Department for Comparative Politics at UiB. Karlsen is a board member of
Nordic Migration Research and the Norwegian Network for Migration Research.

Christine Jacobsen is Professor of Social Anthropology working mainly with questions related to migration and diversity. Her current research uses temporality as an analytical lense to examine power relations and experiences in irregular migration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with irregularized migrants in Marseille, she is currently writing a monograph with the working title Un/documented lives in Marseille: Temporality, Gender and Migration.

Previously she served as Research Director of the Bergen Migration Research Unit, IMER Bergen (2010 – 2011), and Director of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Bergen (2014 – 2020).