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- Convenors:
-
Secil Dagtas
(University of Waterloo)
Vivian Solana Moreno (University of Toronto)
- Discussant:
-
Randa Farah
(University of Western Ontario)
- Stream:
- Relational movements: Migration, Refugees and Borders/Mouvements relationnels: Migration, régugiés et frontières
- Location:
- TBT 327
- Start time:
- 4 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the category of the 'refugee'. It shows how this status embodies multiple positionalities organized around relations of hospitality, forms of (im)mobility, and contested claims for sovereignty, as negotiated and troubled by refugees and citizens in everyday realms of sociality.
Long Abstract:
How do refugees reproduce and regenerate their political struggles across the borders of nation-states? How do their everyday practices subvert the political impotence legally and semantically etched on to the category of the "refugee"? This panel addresses questions of citizenship, hospitality, sovereignty, and state borders by focusing on the everyday life of refugees. The panelists explore the historical production and daily negotiation of the "refugee" status in various sociopolitical contexts including camps, cities, border towns and villages. They show how this status embodies multiple positionalities organized around sociopolitical relations of hospitality, various forms of mobility and immobility, and contested claims for sovereignty, as negotiated and troubled by refugees, citizens, and state institutions in everyday realms of sociality. Attending to these mundane interactions not only complicates the dominant narratives about refugees that either victimize or demonize them, but also reveals the deep connections between national borders, colonial histories, violence, and displacement. If the legal category of "refugee" builds on the idea of the nation as bounded in space by the inviolability of naturalized borders, cross-border and cross-boundary relations of hospitality on the ground continuously unsettle such neat presentations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Focusing on symbolic and administrative processes that displace the moral economy of a Sahrawi pre-revolutionary order into the present, this paper how Sahrawi refugees' women's labor of hospitality folds into the practice and performance of an unstable sovereignty-in-exile.
Paper long abstract:
Since 1975, the Sahrawi national liberation movement—known as the POLISARIO Front—has been organizing itself, while in refugee camps, into a form commensurable with the global model of the modern nation-state: The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Inserting the Sahrawi struggle into what I describe as a "colonial meantime", since 1991, Morocco and the POLISARIO Front are engaged in a UN mediated peace process that is ongoing to this day. This paper examines the way in which Sahrawi refugees' women's labor of hospitality folds into the practice and performance of an unstable sovereignty-in-exile. I show how the space of the "khaima" (tent/household) bears a metonymic relationship with Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through a symbolic process that displace the moral economy of a pre-revolutionary order and early revolutionary period into the present. Moreover, this symbolic process is substantiated by the POLISARIO Front's administrative strategies and practices known as "al-istikbal" and "al-tishrifat" that involve "scaling up" practices of hospitality from the domain of households on to the domain of the Sahrawi Republic. I argue that focusing on the practice of hospitality reveals Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism's enduring reliance upon, and valorization of women's labour as a form of political praxis. Finally, in describing the morphological transformations of the "khaima" through time, I show how present political and economic conditions make living up to the longstanding moral economy of hospitality among the Sahrawi increasingly challenging under the conditions of a colonial meantime.
Paper short abstract:
This paper emphasizes the category of the ‘refugee’ as a historical product. It analyzes the case of Hungarian Roma seeking asylum in Canada, placing this ‘Roma Exodus’ within the wider citizenship processes shaping Central Europe, and asking how Romani migrants themselves negotiate these processes.
Paper long abstract:
The last decade has borne witness to thousands of Hungarian Roma seeking asylum protection in Canada, where Hungary currently figures as one of the leading refugee-sending countries. In this paper, I investigate this 'Roma Exodus' from Hungary to Canada by tracing the lived realities of Hungarian Romani refugees in Canada back to the broader developments taking place within the region from which Romani refugees originate. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in Hungary with archival and media analysis, my research starts from the premise that refugee experiences must be re-embedded and understood within their wider political, economic, and historical contexts. The paper thus emphasizes the need to resist the abstraction of refugee experiences from their broader circumstances, in which asylum-seeking appears to be a 'moment in itself.' The paper explores how the 'Romani refugee' is a product of a particular historical conjuncture defined by the neoliberal economic transformations re-shaping East-Central Europe, where increasingly exclusionary access to citizenship rights, contemporary class restructuring and dispossession, and growing postsocialist populism have dire effects on the marginalization and mobility of Roma. The paper examines these structural changes in light of how Hungarian Roma themselves make sense of their place within them and use mobility as an of citizenship. My research thus ultimately underscores the ways in which Romani refugees 'make themselves' as much as they are made, and 'learn' to be refugees within the current historical moment, in which the 'making of the Romani refugee' is simultaneously both a historical production and a daily negotiation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the relational construction of the categories of "refugee" and "minority" in the Middle East. It focuses on the role of religion in the relations between Syrian newcomers and Turkey's religious minorities who live along the border, specifically the Alawis and Orthodox Christians.
Paper long abstract:
Since the early days of the Syrian conflict, Turkey's border province Hatay has provided a major destination for displaced people due to its geographical proximity to Syria, established cross-border networks, and Arabic speaking demographics. Currently, there are about 15,000 Syrians registered as refugees in five camps in Hatay, while an estimated 200,000 reside in its towns and villages. Based on extended fieldwork in Hatay's administrative capital Antakya and its border town Altinozu, this paper examines the social relations between these displaced groups and Turkey's religious minorities who live along the border, specifically the Arabophone Alawis and Orthodox Christians. I use participant observation and ethnographic interviews to address the central role of religion in shaping Middle Eastern border politics in the absence of structured legal asylum mechanisms. I show how the legal categorizations of "minority" and "refugee" were produced in relation to particular conceptions of religious difference in the context of colonial relations and nation building in the Middle East. I argue that such conceptions continue to shape how both groups negotiate their citizenship in everyday realms of sociality in relation to each other. Ultimately, this paper provides an alternative account of border politics, one that approaches borders as spatiotemporal sites of negotiation not only between local communities and states, but also between people differentiated on the basis of their religion and citizenship.
Paper short abstract:
This paper, part of a broader project on precarious diasporas, pays attention to how the adjudication of refugees/asylum seekers relates to the everyday realm of lived religion and ethical self-fashioning among Sikhs and Ahmadis in Frankfurt.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, part of a broader project on precarious diasporas, pays specific attention to how the adjudication of refugees and asylum seekers relates to the everyday realm of lived religion and ethical self-fashioning among Sikhs and Ahmadis in the Frankfurt/Main region, where I have conducted intermitted phases of ethnographic research between 2003-13. In this paper, I will discuss how the governance of the category of religion affects Sikh and Ahmadi migrants differently, contingent on their legal categorization (the legal construction of 'religious persecution' as opposed to 'political activism' in the asylum court), the policing of places of congregational practice (such as the Sikh gurdwara) and the complex interactions and power relations that become manifest in how refugees and asylum seekers are forced to maneuver and negotiate the uncertainties of the organizational and institutional aspects of their respective communities in the context of state-enforced policies. This paper will also focus on how harsh socioeconomic realities intersect with the daily labor of fashioning religious selves. I do so through an inductive method that pays close attention to how subjects articulate moral sentiments and use specific speech genres to address violence and suffering in their daily encounters, forms of speech that are not already normatively pre-scripted and open up possibilities for alternative social imaginaries.