Uploaded November 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Speaker: Lauren Stokes, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University

As West Germans discussed “difference” after 1945, they sought out a self-consciously “Western” and liberal way to discuss difference. The talk examines different examples of how US social science on race shaped policies on migration in West Germany, including how invoking “Harlem” as a racialized space shaped urban housing policy for migrants in Germany, and how how a theory of child development borrowed from US social science was used to justify new restrictions on child migration.

Lauren Stokes is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford, 2022).

Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, Center for German and European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley, UC Berkeley Department of German, UC Berkeley Department of History, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, UC Berkeley Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender