Capitalist inequality and power, migration, and urbanity: A biographical interview with Nina Glick Schiller

At several junctures, Nina Glick Schiller's1 work has signaled significant turning points in anthropology's—and migration studies’— direction. In this interview, conducted in Tübingen, Germany, on September 26, 2015, Glick Schiller critically reflects on the intertwined nature of her own biographical and intellectual trajectory; one where the boundaries between the intimate and the social, the theoretical and the political, or the intellectual and the personal, are porous and dynamic. Divided into different thematic and chronological sections, the interview gives a glimpse of how her work and thinking have unfolded over the years. Among other things, she discusses her family's migration history and her early years, her committed approach to anthropology as a graduate student at Columbia during the 1968 social uprising, her work both inside and outside academia, and the collaboration that led to the publication of Nations Unbound (Basch et al., 2003 [1994]), a pioneering book in the development of transnationalism studies, influential across multiple disciplines. Delving into the specific theoretical and structural influences that shaped the book's main argument (the existence of transnational migrant networks within a globally restructured political economy), she also discusses mainstream sociologists’ early rejection of the argument and its subsequent misinterpretation as “the end of the nation-state.” Finally, she talks about her time at the University of Manchester, where she cofounded the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, and her later interest in disempowered, nongateway cities, which formed the basis of her more recent theorization—together with Ayşe Çağlar—of migrants as city makers (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018, 2021). Biographical interviews of anthropologists provide valuable insights for a history of anthropology that is increasingly understood as part of the history and sociology of social knowledge-production practices (Bourdieu, 2003; Camic et al., 2011; Kuklick, 1991). That is, these interviews also provide, as Roger I. Lohmann (2008, 89) suggests, anthropological data on anthropologists as “human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts.” Hopefully, this one serves too, as many others did before (e.g., Helm, 1966; Kuper, 1986; Laviolette, 2008; Macfarlane et al., 2005) as a tool for the historicization of anthropologists’ knowledge-making practices within their broader social, political, and cultural contexts. Damián Omar Martínez: To begin, could you speak about your childhood and early years, and your early interest in migration and anthropology? Nina Glick Schiller: I'm the grandchild of immigrants, who came to the United States from the Russian Empire around the early 20th century. My grandparents spoke with accents and the experience of immigration was a taken-for-granted part of my childhood. I grew up in the New York City area in the 1950s and it seemed everyone knew something about the experience of immigrants. This knowledge base was renewed when immigration again became common beginning in the 1960s. So, it wasn't until I began living in New Hampshire that I learned about differences between regions and cities of the country in terms of memories of migration and the embrace of racialized or ethnicized identity. And that this can change in different historical conjunctures. When I arrived in New Hampshire in 1991, my students denied that they had a family history of migration, although many had French Canadian, or Irish, Italian, or Eastern European family names. When I left New Hampshire in 2007, my students were interested in tracing their ancestors’ migration roots and routes. As for the study of anthropology, I did not come from a family of intellectuals and in the 1950s it was assumed that daughters would not go to college or would work only until married. However, of my family history shaped my were differences between my My was her a had in a I. This left my who at and from part of at a who to up her This was early 20th My in from was between from the my although from had a different of My came as a and had a to the my had a of a different my my to New was a in a a When the a and one of which on the the my family my family I grew up about these different I this to your as it was only when I to college that I could my family history in terms of and At New York I my sociology and the of was in my or in the in the to about I understood my family and how of in and I in with I became a sociology in a with a in political I also became political I also was a and the anthropology on the were a were other knew only it was who became a for I to and a became a and many later a of cultural as was a of to on I knew that were differences in my family between the of and social and a of that became the of my interest in social However, it wasn't until when the on a about how and the in the United States became that I understood the of my childhood. 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