Corey Ragsdale

Human migration has played a key role in history, from the earliest dispersals out of Africa to the millions of people forcibly or willingly leaving their homes today. With increasing migration as a response to political upheaval and climate change, there is a growing need to address how migrants successfully integrate into host societies. Contemporary social science research has focused on short-term interactions between migrants and hosts, but successful integration must also be assessed over time. Archaeology is capable of bringing together contemporary migration dynamics with the long-term processes of interaction between migrants and hosts, and is useful in bridging temporal and population scales. This workshop brings together anthropologists who have studied migration from diverse perspectives and have chosen to collaborate and synthesize their data and expertise around a central question: how do migration processes affect human securities? The seven dimensions of human securities defined by the United Nations (economic, food, environmental, health, personal, political, community) will be transformed into proxy variables using biological, archaeological, ethnological, and historical data. The proposed workshop will examine the relationships among these variables across environmental, sociocultural, and politico-legal boundaries through comparative analysis of a multitude of case studies over time. Participants will propose a much needed, integrated model to better understand post-migration relationships and promote successful social integration of migrants in the long-term.