The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility

In the world’s leading city of immigration, in a time of a troubling resurgence of anti-migrant action and rhetoric, in a University with a faculty and student body committed to social justice, the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School supports critical and applied scholarship and provides opportunities for social action and policy engagement for faculty, students and the broader University community.

The Institute’s program fosters concentric circles of scholarship and action—in our University, our city, and the world. We contribute to the University community by offering additional courses, sponsoring lectures and events, and supporting extended visits of leading scholars. We engage deeply with New York City, supporting student work with the wide range of groups and communities in the City. And we undertake initiatives to inform and influence public debate and public policy at the national and global level.

The term “mobility” in the Institute’s name is the key to our mission. It commits us to a dynamic understanding of concepts central to the field of migration studies—borders, citizenship and other forms of membership, the nation-state, forced migration, migration due to climate change and disasters. It also opens up for examination the prevailing political, cultural and economic narratives that both influence and are influenced by scholarship, policy and social action. It is a time for serious scrutiny of the premises, categories and policies that have produced the current historical moment, and for imagining new approaches to understanding human mobility (and immobility).