Associate Professor Nicholas Harney was trained at Harvard and the University of Toronto in social anthropology. He is currently the Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in migration studies at the University of Western Australia. Previously, he was the Coordinator of Research and Archives at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario and one of the co-founders of the Global Gathering Place and the educational workshop tool, Inspector Relic.
Associate Professor Harney offers the unique perspective of someone with extensive grant-funded field work experience on the themes of emigration, immigration and multiculturalism on three continents (North America, Europe and Australia). Recently, as a Visiting Fellow at the Università degli Studi di Napoli, Federico II, Dipartimento di Sociologia, he examined non-EU migrants, knowledge work and informal economies in Naples, Italy. Associate Professor Harney, therefore, is able to speak of global processes through the migration perspective in an expansive and textured way through time and geography (space). Associate Professor Harney can compare and contrast the experiences of the first major phase of post-war migration (Italians and the diaspora) and the second major phase in the last half-century after the economic and political restrictions starting in the 1970s (non-EU migrants from [South] Asia, Africa, etc.). This research on irregular migrants in the informal economy in Italy has attracted international interest. As a result of his publications Associate Professor Harney was asked by the editors of the new Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology to contribute an entry on ‘shadow work’ (2007). Moreover, his article in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (2006) received an Emerald Literati Network Highly Commended Award 2007 as chosen by the editors.
Harney’s two books based on research on Italian emigrants, Eh Paesan! Being Italian In Toronto (University of Toronto Press, [1998] 1999 2nd edition) and The Lucky Immigrant (2002) examined the creative and imaginative work of identity formation and community construction processes among urban Italian immigrants and their children within the context and confines of state practices and discourses as regards multiculturalism, transnationalism, social integration and citizenship. A review in the journal Diaspora called “Eh Paesan … the most nuanced analysis of identity available for contemporary populations of people of Italian origin anywhere in the world.” (Diaspora 7:2 1998, p. 273).
Associate Professor Harney has established a rigorous and extensive undergraduate interdisciplinary teaching field in migration studies, which has increased UWA’s offerings in the area by 150% and quadrupled students studying this timely area of contemporary academic and popular concern. Each year of teaching at UWA, one of the units is offered at the Albany regional campus. In 2007, Associate Professor Harney was nominated in two categories for Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Teaching Awards: Teaching Excellence and (PhD) Research Supervision.
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