Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Sarbani Sharma
(Azim Premji University)
dyuti a (University of Sussex)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/007
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to brings together a discussion on political potentialities of solidarity building movements and how they contribute to socio-political transformations. What kind of solidarities matter in altering, subverting, challenging the common knowledge and understanding of equality.
Long Abstract:
Jacques Rancière imagines politics to be the opposition to police order by the excluded and marginalized (Ranciére 2010). The potential of politics, he argues, lies in the reordering of relations of power across and in between various cultural groups. The two past decades, in the lifetime of many of us, have seen moments that have (re)defined the contours of the liberation-equality project across the world. The assertion, resistances from the margins has pushed the boundaries of the manner in which the liberation-equality projects are both imagined and articulated. This panel attempts to develop a conversation about the possibilities and complexities of transformation possible through active solidarity building movements. It seeks to examine and interrogate the notion of solidarity and seeks to engage with questions of what is solidarity? How does the good old anthropological question of reflexivity and positionality redefine meanings and potentialities of solidarity across contested terrains? Does the politics of hope always get trapped in a colonial imagination of resilience? The panel invites debates and ethnographies that have been able to problematize the question of solidarities and its implications on transformative politics as well as on to the social meanings of hope today.
We invite panelists to interrogate the political potential of solidarity to the project of transformation today in the times of Black Lives Matter, Dalit Equality Project, Right to Self-Determination Movements, Islamophobia and Hate Speech. The panel seeks to explore the question -What are the limits of solidarity and transformation through solidarity?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Across the world, citizens have tried to publicly perform solidarity with illegalized migrants. In this presentation I explore how such performances generate an ambivalent aesthetics of suffering and conviviality.
Paper long abstract:
Through the concept of the ‘border spectacle’, several anthropologists have shown how nation-states perform their sovereign power over who has legitimate access to their territories (Cantat 2020; De Genova 2013). At the same time, relatively scant attention has been given to its conceptual counterpart: consciously ostensible acts of helping those trying to cross these borders. Across the world, grassroots initiatives offering both humanitarian and political support to migrants have tried to embody and spread an image of solidarity towards the broader public. In this presentation I argue that such performances of solidarity do not so much mystify and legitimise structural power asymmetries through a ‘spectacle’ of suffering, but rather generate an ambivalent aesthetics of suffering and conviviality.
On the one hand, grassroots initiatives try to embody a form of civil disobedience vis-à-vis hostile migration policies. They try to make to make these policies’ inhumane consequences visible, and show that a critical mass of ‘ordinary’ citizens are willing and able to organise alternatives. On the other hand, by emphasising their willingness to help, these initiatives constantly risk sliding into a neo-colonial storyline casting themselves as moral heroes in a scene of suffering. While some of these initiatives are highly critical of this postcolonial imagery, the lure of embodying solidarity continues to draw them into an ambivalent politics of performance. In this presentation I draw on ethnographic work with Belgian grassroots initiatives to show how they struggle with and respond to their role as actors helping migrants, set in a stage of hostility.
Paper short abstract:
This paper problematizes the position of ultras in Croatia during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the early stages of the pandemic, ultras have shown big solidarity towards other citizens. During this “chaotic” period, their social position shifted from marginal to central. But, the stigma prevailed.
Paper long abstract:
This paper problematizes the position of football supporters and ultras in Croatia during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the early stages of the pandemic, ultras have shown solidarity towards other citizens as they were the first and most numerous informal groups to help logistically set up hospital centres for Covid-19 patients and to assist with the Red Cross deliveries to older citizens. Their help was even bigger in times of earthquakes in Croatia. During this “chaotic” period, the social position and role of the often stigmatised subculture shifted to recognition and appreciation from other citizens and even official institutions. Despite this, some commonalities prevailed. Whilst everyone in society was forced to wear medical masks for protection thus following new rules in this “state of exception”, ultras were not allowed to carry medical masks on the stadium as masks were a potential tool for “masking” that the law considers illegal activity on stadiums. In this particular microcosmos, ultras were treated as always - they were stripped from the right to be more secure from the disease. With the theoretical background provided by Agamben’s work and ethnographic research on ultras group Bad Blue Boys during the pandemic, this paper tries to make sense of a paradoxical situation where new practices and rules are being used selectively thus perpetuating the stigmatisation of the Others, in this case, the ultras.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the (un)making and rethinking of solidarities in a state of perceived transformed co-existence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper strives to move beyond the ethos of integration as axiomatically malfunctioning in Sweden and explores the specifics of how convivialities and contentions are formulated in a condition of commonplace plurality. Inspired by concepts such as 'post-migrant' (Foroutan 2019) and 'post-Otherness' (Ndikung & Römhild 2013) as well as a fundamental 'de-migranticization' (Dahinden 2016) of the research process, I discuss how to bridge the migrant/native divide, how to destabilise categorisations and how to understand the interconnectedness between previously cemented categories. Building on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork amongst employees at a department store in Sweden, this paper aspires to explore solidarities, convivialities, contentions and conflicts in encounters of plurality by closing in on the case of selling and caring for goldfishes in a commercial setting. The goldfish, or any 'goldish' fish, as a symbol of progress and life, featured at Nowruz [the Persian New Year] has become a junction of specific cultural significances vis-à-vis cultural stereotypes. Additionally, the practices going into selling goldfishes illustrate how social categories are contested, reproduced, and constructed in a condition of everyday differences. The paper utilises the manifold cultural significances of the goldfish to present some alternatives for moving beyond the ethno-focal lens, where the goldfish will act as a nexus for the various encounters, emotions and practices that goes into understanding co-existence.