Yasemin Soysal

University of Essex

Yasemin Soysal is Professor of Sociology, and member of the Center for Migration Studies and the Center for Human Rights, University of Essex. Her research brings transnational and global perspectives to the study of the historical development and contemporary reconfigurations of the nation-state, citizenship, and human rights, with specific interest in the transnational transformations of the national (for recent examples, see: “Mapping the Terrain of Transnationalization: Nation, Citizenship, and Region” and “Citizenship, Immigration, and the European Social Project: Rights and Obligations of Individuality”[2012 British Journal of Sociology Annual Lecture]). She is currently preoccupying herself with the theorization and empirical studies of the transnationally standardized scripts of the individual with agency and expectations (competitive, aspirational, and meritocratically capable), focusing on three analytical nodes: a) the processes and agencies of the diffusion of such scripts in an increasingly fragmented and multi-polar world order, b) the scripts and institutions of the agentic individual in comparative contexts, and c) the paradoxical implications of the increasing gap between the scripts and institutional practices. The two research projects she is leading speak to these questions. First one is a large scale, multi-sited survey of higher education students in China, Japan, UK, and Germany (over a representative sample size of 8000), focusing on self-projections and future orientations among other things. The second one is on the transformations of higher education institutions in their pursuit of internationalization, collecting comparative data on organizational level strategic goals and indicators such as human resources and governance structures dedicated to the internationalization mission.