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- Convenors:
-
Raymond Apthorpe
(Royal Anthropological Institute)
Sarah Bittel (The Graduate Institute Geneva)
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- Stream:
- Movement
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 16 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Part of the broader picture of their material and immaterial circumstances, settings, and representation is the greater or lesser self-agency which refugees, aid-workers, and migrants come to have and inhabit in their everyday lives in place, power, and time.
Long Abstract:
Alike in their own eyes and those of their beholders, refugees, aid-workers, and migrants as residents, neighbours, workers, co-religionists, and in other associational roles and statuses, become through their own agency in place, power and time more than ‘just’ refugees, aid-workers, migrants. Changing self- and other images and imaginaries come to define the geographical and social scene as new ways of living and livelihood and looking for work take hold. There is therefore a broader, multi-dimensional, intelligibility as people in their everyday lives, as beings and bodies, beyond and transcending such ascribed, one- dimensional, ‘refugee’, ‘aid-worker’ and ‘migrant’ labelling respectively as passive and weak, active and powerful, and anomalous and transitory.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 16 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
With images being omnipresent in our contemporary world, the way migrants are visualized is inherently linked to the way they are socially and politically perceived. This paper looks into visuals produced by Afghan migrants in Athens and Berlin in order to reflect on their imaginaries of "Europe".
Paper long abstract:
With images being omnipresent in our contemporary world (WJT Mitchell 2005, Mirzoeff 2011), the way migrants are visualized is inherently linked to the way they are socially and politically perceived, as images play a key role in regulating political discourse, creating categories such as legal/illegal and sustaining stereotypes. But despite pictures relevance, refugees' visual self-representations remain almost completely absent from public as well as scholarly interest. As part of my PhD research, this paper looks at Afghan migrants based in Athens and Berlin and their existing practices of self-representation on social media platforms, as a focus on migrants' images seems key to understand tensions between their everyday live in a new European context and social expectations they have to fulfill, in order to not be considered as having 'failed' by friends and family members in the home country. Therefore, looking into these visuals informs on how they see and engage with their own circumstances and reflects their imaginaries of "Europe". By countering and deconstructing a common image of migrants, this research aims to broaden the spectrum of migrant representations by re-working a dominant visual field, and to bring the migrant himself in the center of knowledge production.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the liminal subjectivities of international humanitarians on a Greek island as shaped through everyday encounters that reveal parallels between the study of humanitarianism, migration and tourism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper responds to Lisa Smirl's observation that the 'highly visible bodies and physical environments of aid workers are almost completely overlooked in any analysis of post-crisis reconstruction or emergency response' (2008:237). Based on fieldwork on an Aegean island that has experienced massive social change since 2015, this paper turns attention away from refugees and towards the thousands of people, mostly from the global north, who cross borders to 'help' or 'stand in solidarity' with refugees. Humanitarian and Mediterranean imaginaries combine in the safety and familiarity of a Greek island as a unique context for people wishing to 'practice' international humanitarianism, meet the exotic other or simply enjoy the weather, food and beaches. With many from this social group staying for a couple of weeks or as little as a few days, their 'sightseeing', 'souvenir gathering', fluctuating presence and deep engagement with the island's touristic infrastructure challenge rigid notions of who is a humanitarian and who is a tourist. Analysis reveals multiple realities as these visitors variously and discursively distance themselves from or embrace concepts and practices associated with tourism. The paper explores the liminal subjectivities of humanitarians on the island and how they are shaped through everyday encounters with other 'humanitarians' and 'tourists', 'refugees', 'locals', and other 'others'. It demonstrates the fluidity and intersecting nature of these socially constructed categories while testing the perhaps unhelpful analytical binary of host and guest. In doing so, it aims to contribute to knowledge in the fields of humanitarianism, migration and tourism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore how church membership provides Naga migrants from Northeast India with safe social spaces and a sense of belonging in the mega-city of New Delhi, which help them negotiate their multi-layered marginality and exclusion and rework and resist dominant relations of power.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past several decades, the rise of militant Hindu ideologies within the political space of India has exacerbated existing communal tensions and rifts, which has resulted in the severe marginalisation and discrimination of sizeable minority communities, especially in India's cities. However, while many minority migrants are subjected to similar forms of discrimination and exclusion in the mega-city of New Delhi, for example, some, such as the Naga from Northeast India, are quite distinguishable from the imagination of what constitutes the Indian 'mainstream' and as a result, they experience multi-layered forms of everyday precarity and violence. By virtue of being Scheduled Tribes, the Naga are subjected to structural violence within the Hindu caste system, which relegates members of scheduled tribes to the bottom of the social hierarchy and also exhibits a strong racial prejudice; they are vulnerable to economic exploitation in the neoliberal economy of New Delhi; they are often exposed to sexual violence; and their religious identities make them regular targets of xenophobic violence. With an ethnographic focus on some Naga Baptist churches in New Delhi, this paper will explore how church membership provides Naga migrants not only with a strong social network which mediates connections with the wider society back home but also, more importantly, with a sense of belonging and safe social spaces within the general precariousness of the mega-city in which they can devise and share mechanisms for coping with their marginality and exclusion and rework and resist dominant relations of power.
Paper short abstract:
The bodies of migrant domestic workers (MDWs), by engaging in seemingly simple acts as walking, theatrical performance and protesting, constantly threatened by the memory of deported MDWs, challenge the existing notions of migrant domestic labour as a private domain from which the state is removed.
Paper long abstract:
From a theoretical lens that is located at the intersection of the anthropology of space and place and feminist geography, I propose an examination of the spaces of resistance that Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs) create in the city of Beirut. To counter the repression imposed on their everyday lives through the kafala (sponsorship) system administering migrant labour in Lebanon, MDWs engage in various forms of embodied resistance. I look at how the act of walking and engaging in temporary placemaking (Low 2014) in the streets challenges the paternalistic sponsorship system that attempts to control MDWs' bodies and limit their movement in the city. Moreover, by performing their political struggles through walking in demonstrations and theatrical enactments, MDWs pose a threat to the existing order that seeks to render racialised and gendered bodies of labour invisible. This is evident in the state actors' attempts to break this embodied presence through deportation and fearmongering. The case studies that will be presented in this work make part of a ten months long engaged ethnography that is based on a larger dissertation project. An intersectional (Valentine 2007) and spatial ethnographic study of MDWs' everyday lives offers an opportunity to study the state at its margins (Das and Poole 2004). Space is conceived here not as a simple container of these social relations but rather as a dialogue between the body and the city (Low 2003) that shifts the understanding of dichotomies such as private/public, visible/invisible, as well as inclusion and exclusion.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the spatiotemporal porosity of the squatted "refugee neighborhood" of Prosfygika in Athens, and the ways in which the recent Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey inscribe their experiences of survival and revolutionary hope into the affective materialities.
Paper long abstract:
In the recent years, there have been growing numbers of political refugees from Turkey in Athens. Greece has been their primary destination due to its geographical proximity, but also because of the historical continuity and the existing social networks and spaces of Turkish and Kurdish refugees in Athens. Yet, the historical connections and continuities are deeper and more entangled than it first appears, and they are inscribed into the material environments of refuge. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the recent Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey in Athens, this paper explores ethnographically and theoretically one such spatiotemporal "node" of refugeehood, the "refugee neighborhood" of Prosfygika. The housing complex was built in the 1930s for the Greek-Orthodox refugees, forcefully displaced from Asia Minor in the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange. The buildings are currently home to a large self-organized squatter community, consistent of left-wing activist groups, artists, homeless locals, and various migrants/refugees, and represent one of the epicenters of grassroot urban politics. As such, Prosfygika is a material "node" in a constellation of affective histories of violence connecting Turkey and Greece on the one hand, and on the other a site of spatiotemporal "porosity," realized through negotiating cultural encounters, mutual recognition, and politics of place. By inhabiting and decorating their homes, and taking part in the communal life of the neighborhood, the recent political exiles from Turkey contribute to the porous textures of forced displacement, precarity, and marginalization, but also of survival, temporary home-making, political struggle, and revolutionary hope.
Paper short abstract:
Reflecting on the different emotions expressed by attendants at the inauguration of a mural done by refugees and residents of Perintis Sub-district in Medan, Indonesia, I will illustrate how refugees' presence have complex affects on the lives of local residents and their access to certain spaces.
Paper long abstract:
Indonesia has long been perceived as a transit state for refugees on their way to Australia. In more recent years, the decline in resettlement opportunities has forced about 14,000 refugees in Indonesia to live in a state of indefinite transit. Approaching encounters between refugees and residents ethnographically, I aim to explore how responses and reactions to refugees' presence in Indonesia are deeply emotive and speak to broader discourses of identity.
One event that stood out during fourteen months of multi-sited ethnographic research, was the inauguration of a mural organised by the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) and local officials in Medan, Indonesia. The mural was meant to represent a positive collaboration between residents and refugees. However, it was also a contested space between government and IOM officials that were presenting the mural as a positive achievement for refugees and the sub-district and disgruntled vendors who had been working on the road since 1994 and were forced to relocate their stalls for the mural. Taking the expressed emotions of those present seriously, the inauguration of the mural is a moment that captures an intersection of multiple lives; where the ideal of promoting awareness to protect refugees affects the lives of residents and their access to certain spaces. The mural epitomizes political projects that reflect and influence how refugees are treated by their host society. Examining emotion/ affect highlights the complex ways that refugees, whose identities are defined by international conventions and their global movements, are given meaning within specific localities.