Paper short abstract:

The process of illegalization limits rejected asylum seekers' access to resources, mobility and spaces. Based on ethnographic insights from departure camps in Switzerland, I show how illegalization produces spaces of othering, which are challenged.

Paper long abstract:

Rejected asylum seekers' illegalized status serves as a justification for political, social, and legal processes of exclusion. This exclusion should be viewed in light of historical and contemporary mechanisms of racialization and spatial exclusion of 'Others' in Switzerland.

First, this paper shows that the process of marking a person as "illegal" is part of their containment within racialized spaces. Second, it discusses how rejected asylum seekers engage in acts of contestation to counter their spatial containment. Third, this paper juxtaposes Swiss authorities' attempts to ignore, belittle, and delegitimize rejected asylum seekers' demands with its reputation as a humanitarian and neutral country.

I rely on four years of ethnographic fieldwork, joining activist and volunteer groups at departure camps and deportation prisons, volunteering at a political school offering language courses, and conducting go-along interviews with rejected asylum seekers.

Using an interdisciplinary approach this paper aims to show how the illegalization process reveals historical links to the mistreatment of people marked as "others" and constructing a hierarchy involving racialized separation and categorization to control their access to resources, citizenship and mobility. I aim to contribute to a broader debate about the constituting relationship between race, space and illegality and the significance of studying these aspects simultaneously when analyzing contemporary issues of illegalization.

Paper short abstract:

In this lecture I focus on the developments and changes in a project – the Sewing Café – that I have co-organized and have been involved in since the beginning. In connection with Orientalism and Eurocentrism I focus on changes in this space from a post-colonial perspective.

Paper long abstract:

This lecture is based on a small part of my PhD project titled New boom of refugees supportwork. Between Welcome Culture and Refugees Welcome.

In this lecture I focus on the developments and changes in a project – the Sewing Café – that I have co-organized and have been involved in since the beginning. In connection with Orientalism and Eurocentrism (see Said and Chakrabarty) I analyze othering processes from a post-colonial perspective.

I am going to show how the white-German "helpers" in this space, who (consciously or unconsciously) have "helpfulness" in their self-images, construct themselves as complete and without fundamental deficiencies. In form of the Sewing Café they have created a space that I would call a space of helping. Asylum seekers are constructed as helpless, needy and weak "others" in this space of helping.

At the same time, I will address how the asylum seekers have changed and developed this space of helping to a space of interaction, participation and enjoying.

As the social space is a living phenomenon, from this perspective I am looking at the developments, changes and entanglements in the power / knowledge complex manifested herein. I am pursuing the questions of how affiliations and exclusions are / were formed in this space, how the relevant boundaries, changes and contradictions proceed and were constructed, but also how this space is opened up and how these are related to or interact with each other.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the ways, in which Iranian refugees in Germany articulate their lives, experiences, and movements in relation to "integration" and tackles precisely the ways integration also opens up spaces for struggles and resistance against the expectations, stigmatizations and rules.

Paper long abstract:

"Integration" has been used as a combination for "migration" for almost two decades in Germany. Entangling with macro-level political and economic aspects produced around the concept, this combination caused a massive circulation of funding projects and forms of knowledge production about and around the so-called "integration" of immigrants in the German society, which is assumed as a coherent homogeneous unity. On the other hand, This has also severe impacts on the immigrant´s lives through their everyday confrontations with the word. In this paper, I recall three scenes from the field to evaluate the impacts of "Integration" as a discourse and sociopolitical formation on the lives of the Iranian refugees in Germany from their very first confrontations with the word to their attempts of building their lives in a new country. Carried out between 2017-2019, I conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Iranian refugees in Germany in order to investigate the ways in which they articulate their lives, experiences, and movements concerning their confrontation with "integration". Moving beyond the expectations and rules this discourse produced, and also labels such as "integrated" and "not integrated", this paper tackles precisely the ways integration also opens up spaces for struggle and resistance against the expectations, stigmatizations and rules.

Paper short abstract:

Ana Troncoso Salazar examines how the south of Chile materialized as a German space and what the arrival of German Jewish refugees meant for it.

Paper long abstract:

Because of the persecution in Germany during the Nazi regime, German Jews have to flee to Chile. There they met a German colony that was established in the middle of the 19th century and which is now being criticized as part of the indigenous movement. Based on an ethnography with a camera, in my doctoral project I analyze the adaptation potential of racism and its role in identity tensions and the configurations of space, specially a german space in southern Chile.

In my contribution I put the process of adapting my dissertation project to a cultural studies film up for discussion. I ask how racialized citizenship processes from German Jews in Chile can be presented audiovisually. Furthermore, the thematization of ethical questions in relation to representation and the knowledge production process, as well as the position of one's own narrative perspective are central.