MESA Banner
Mapping The Middle East in Sweden Using Geographic Information System
Abstract
Academic studies of immigration tend to be dominated by debates about differences among voluntary versus involuntary immigrants, refugee versus non-refugee status immigrants, degrees of assimilation, integration, or marginalization of immigrant communities within a host society, the existence or absences of ethnic enclaves within and across immigrant communities, and so on. These debates are extremely important. However, academic debates such as these tend to lack the important and complementary backdrops of less subjective maps or geographical representations of immigrant communities. This presentation places Geographic Information System (GIS) and Geospatial technologies at the center of broader on-going debates within Migration Studies. Merging cartography and database technology that rely upon GIS, this presentation will provide a statistical overview and a spatial analysis of the "Middle East" in Sweden. Therefore, in addition to the important academic debates mentioned above, the migration and mobility of populations can be studied as temporal and spatial phenomena with varying characteristics depending on scale (national origins, households, and individuals) of the study. Analyzing the comprehensive body of statistical data from "Statistic Sweden" (a government agency that produces statistics on Sweden) this presentation seeks to answer questions linked to spatial migration and mobility. What are the demographics of movement and integration of people from the Middle East to Swedene Are these communities stable over time or do they tend to be more dynamica Are spatial dynamics restricted to the urbanization processes that occur within city boundaries or do spatial dynamics also occur across city boundariesr When in Sweden, to what extent do different groups (national, ethnical, religious) create sub-communities in the new countryn Moreover, do different groups move internationally among Scandinavian countriesr These are the types of important background factors that will be mapped and analyzed in this paper.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries