Feldman Curriculum Vitae (PDF Document)
GREGORY FELDMAN (PhD Syracuse) is a political anthropologist interested in the state, globalization, migration, and population regulation. He has a forthcoming book with Stanford University Press tentatively titled The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union.
The Migration Apparatus ethnographically examines how European officials construct labor migrants as policy problems to be solved in particular ways. It traces the formation of the migrant as a policy object in the context of four interconnected policy domains: circulation migration programs, border control, and collection and storage of biometric data. The relevant policy processes are situated in Europe's contradictory situation regarding migration: the need to import labor to compensate for its aging workforce and the pressure to tighten border control for fear of unwanted persons on its territory. Working with Foucault's notion of the apparatus (dispositif), The Migration Apparatus also explores the methodological possibilities for "nonlocal ethnography", which accounts for empirical processes that cannot be apprehended solely through empiricist methods.
Dr. Feldman's earlier research program was based on an ethnographic study of how western and Estonian officials developed the Estonian integration policy for its Russian-speaking population in the run-up to EU accession in 2004. It involved over a year of extensive fieldwork (1999-2001) in Tallinn, Estonia among Estonian state bureaucrats, Nordic diplomats, Russian minority leaders, NGO leaders, and officials from the European Commission, United Nations Development Programme, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Dr. Feldman co-founded and co-convenes the Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy of the American Anthropological Association. He founded and convened UBC's Inter-Faculty Initiative on Migration Studies. He is also a founding steering committee member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist. He has consulted for the United Nations Development Programme to evaluate ethnic integration programs in Estonia funded by the European Union-PHARE Programme and the Nordic countries.