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- Convenors:
-
Elisabeth Kirtsoglou
(Durham University)
Olga Demetriou (University of Durham)
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- Stream:
- Displacements of Power
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 1.02
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel focuses on the neoliberal political project as the common foundation of the European economic and migration 'crises', and scrutinises visions of 'modernity', 'progress' and 'integration' that produce economies of alterity and dependence, congruent with post/crypto colonial geographies.
Long Abstract:
Taking its inspiration from the anthropology of South Europe, the panel wishes to ethnographically substantiate the effects of the (neo)liberal political project as the shared foundation of the European economic and migration 'crises'. Our aim is to demonstrate that neoliberal visions of 'modernity', 'progress' and 'integration' produce economies and hierarchies of entitlement, desirability and undesirability, exclusion and inclusion and, ultimately, taxonomies that appear to be congruent with post and crypto colonial geographies. We wish to document different -culturalist, racialist, historical and economic- forms of establishing alterity and undesirability and the ways in which alterity has been discursively and biopolitically managed through a series of (supra)state policies and structural adjustment measures in a neo-colonial manner. We claim that neoliberal visions of modernity form the bedrock of xenophobic, islamophobic, anti-migrant discourses, but also of asymmetrical structures of extractive economic relations between national and supranational entities. The panel invites papers that scrutinise the role of concepts such as 'progress', 'integration', or 'humanitarianism' as (post)colonial technologies that permeate state-citizen relations, policy narratives and casual sociality. Ultimately, we wish to document a series of regimes of producing and managing difference, that either transform difference into forms of 'radical and incommensurable alterity' or seek to eradicate it by hegemonically commanding the conditions of the 'Other's' integration.
Keywords: Migration, Economic Crisis, Humanitarianism, Modernity, Progress, Neoliberalism, Crypto/post-coloniality, Radical alterity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 5 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
I explore accounts of citizen volunteers who support Syrian refugees in Germany and the UK. The discussion revolves around affective relationalities which negotiate boundaries of culture and power, normative discourses about immigration, and critical public moods that have shifted to the right.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses practices of citizen volunteering that emerged around the 'refugee crisis' in Germany and the UK. While policies of refugee admission in 2015 differed markedly in both countries, there was a comparable surge in solidarity among ordinary citizens, giving rise to forms of voluntarism which became known as 'welcome culture' in Germany and assumed a vital role in the UK's resettlement programme for Syrian refugees. Based on research among volunteers in rural regions in the UK and Germany the paper examines volunteering as expressions of care and sympathy, and their respective political underpinnings. Anthropologists have argued that new moralities of charity and 'compassion' have become central to neoliberal state craft, informing the management of both, immigration policy and post-welfare social environments. Against the backdrop of some of these arguments I focus on volunteer accounts and the ways in which they construct relationships of care with refugees. In exploring these narrative acts of charity and compassion I show how actors reproduce cultural normativity on the one hand, yet also create vehicles for anti-racist (albeit politically passive) introspection on the other.
Paper short abstract:
This paper provides an overview of complementary forms of protection applied in Europe since 1999. It argues, firstly, that as with refugee status, this protection is more political than needs-focussed. Secondly, it shows that some of the issues raised in the post-2015 era are more long-standing.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides an overview of complementary forms of protection applied in Europe since 1999. It argues, firstly, that as with refugee status, this protection is more political than needs-focussed. Secondly, it shows that some of the issues raised in the post-2015 period, dubbed as 'crisis' are actually long-standing. Therefore, one of the aims of the paper is to contribute to the discussion about the political import of 'crisis' discourse.
The paper combines ethnographic research with a critical reading of available statistics as well as a reading of critical legal analyses of the complementary protection regime. This allows for a rounded approach to the way in which complementary protection subjects are constructed and therefore a better understanding of the multiple and diverging politics at stake. A parallel aim of the paper, therefore, is methodological - i.e. to examine the relevance of differing disciplinary approaches to data relating to displacement.
Paper short abstract:
The Republic of Cyprus is "selling" its (EU) passports to elite migrants due to a recent crisis. This paper explores class, the global dynamics of a citizenship as commodity and the internal inequalities this scheme reflects
Paper long abstract:
A uniquely produced crisis, "dealt with" through a banking bail-in in 2013, was the birth moment of a specific type of elite migration in the Republic of Cyprus. Formulated under the auspice of the country's "citizenship by investment scheme", this is a fast-track programme for the naturalization of foreign investors. Cyprus, an EU member situated in the Middle East, and a country suffering a 45-year division sealed by a cease-fire line, is locked in a nexus of difficult citizenship politics, which this scheme (facilitating elite mobility) complicates even further. Such uncomfortable politics concern both Turkish-Cypriots (citizens of the RoC but in practice excluded from the state), Turkish settlers in the North, and of course migrants from both Eastern Europe and the Levant. This paper argues that the ethics of buying citizenship are rooted in the international politics of class, as opposed to bonds between migrant-citizen-state, as the European Union and liberal consensus in general argue. Based on fieldwork with the gate-keeping middlepersons who facilitate the naturalization of the global rich in Cyprus, the paper shall place international and EU dynamics of power in the specifics of a crisis-ridden economy, a basic export commodity of which is now the EU passport.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the ways in which crises produce disposable subjects and superfluous populations forced to live in conditions of hyper-precarity. Austerity measures and refugee reception structures- can be seen as regimes of managing difference that produce economies of alterity and dependence.
Paper long abstract:
The paper examines the ways in which crises produce disposable subjects and superfluous populations forced to live in conditions of hyper-precarity. Through a parallel ethnography of refugee reception structures and the impact of austerity measures in Greece, I focus on policies and discourses that affected asylum seekers, but also local Greek citizens during the period 2014-2017. I claim that neoliberal 'structural adjustments' imposed on Greek people during the financial crisis revealed a precariat almost-ready to hegemonically accept the superiority of the cultural project of global capitalism. Similarly, a number of asylum-seekers who arrived in Greece during the 2015-2016 period, portrayed and imagined Germany (and Europe at large) as the land of opportunity, for the sake of which they were prepared to endure a condition of partial citizenship. Ultimately, both kinds of contexts -austerity measures and refugee reception structures- can be seen as regimes of managing difference that produce economies of alterity and dependence.
Paper short abstract:
The subject of the presentation are the ethical and practical dilemmas NGO activists face when raising public support to influence decisions in migrants' legal cases. The presentation is based on an extensive fieldwork as well as an analysis of public interventions.
Paper long abstract:
The subject matter of the presentation is the role of NGO activists' in the cultural production of migrants' representations in the public sphere. I am interested in the dilemmas the activists face when raising public support for a migrant's legal administrative case in order to influence a bureaucratic decision. My main questions are: How do the activists, as migrants' representatives, define their ethical duties towards their clients, the public opinion and the bureaucratic institutions? How do they reconcile or mediate between those three sets of principles in practice? How do they perceive their social influence? In order to answer these questions, I study public petitions against deportation reconstructing the social context in which they are written and analyzing their form and content in the light of the dominant discourse on migration in Poland. The presentation is based on interviews with activists, a 6-moth participant observation at one of the Polish NGOs offering help to migrants as well as and analysis of the intervention texts. I argue that one of the biggest challenges for the activists is to protect migrants' privacy as both the logic of bureaucratic proceedings and the neoliberal discourse turn migrants' intimacies into central arguments in disputes over their right to stay.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ambiguity of Iceland as a welcoming and safe space for migrants. Drawing on the notion of Nordic exceptionalism, it explores how individual and state mechanisms racialise and hierarchise migrant 'Others' and respond to various understandings of 'hospitality' and 'integration'
Paper long abstract:
This paper contends with the ambiguity of Iceland as a social space for migrants and migrant families, sometimes considered open and progressive, sometimes conservative and insular. The dialogue on migrants and refugees following the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015-2016 has received a lot of media attention in Iceland and internationally and drawn attention to the existing divide between the apparent support of the local population towards migrants and refugees and prevailing state policies. Despite recent efforts to include migrants in Icelandic national narratives and discourses, the focus in societal debates on migration remains oriented towards including migrants in nation-states projects and ideals. The paper investigates how both the Nordic myth of homogeneity and exceptionalism render certain migrant groups in/visible through racialisation and hierarchisation processes in Icelandic society, and how it impacts politics of hospitality and integration.