Movement | Talks

Stelios Michalopoulos (Associate Professor of Economics, Brown University, Rhode Island, USA)

"Refugees in the Mediterranean: Long-term Consequences of the 1923 Population Exchange"

This ongoing project looks at a watershed event in the making of modern Greece: the internationally sanctioned, forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Its perceived success set the blueprint for subsequent population exchanges after the Second World War. We reconstruct for the first time an almost complete catalog of the refugee settlements in Greece, along with the refugees’ respective places of origin in nowadays Turkey. We then trace the long-run economic and political consequences of refugee inflows for the receiving communities in Greece and the descendants of refugees themselves.

"Legal Geographies of (Un)safety and Asylum"

Arrays of perceived ‘crises’ have impacted on European policies on migration, leveraging their priorities towards fortressing EU’s external borders, externalizing asylum responsibilities, and creating a ‘buffer zone’ at Europe’s periphery, and towards increasing ‘returns’ (aka deportations and rejections of asylum claims) via designations of ‘safety’. Mapping these new legal geographies of ‘safety’ exposes the degree of differentiation in access to rights, depending on people’s nationalities and mobility trajectories. In this presentation, this is exemplified through the application of the Internal Protection/Flight Alternative, as employed in court decisions on asylum applications of Afghan nationals, and particularly regarding the city of Kabul.

Thus, geography and its significations become increasingly significant in what concerns both individual and collective rights. The diverse geographies of (un)safety jeopardize not only access to asylum and the ‘right to flee’, but also the access to several other rights, and even ‘the right to have rights’. However, if subject positions change, then such geographies change respectively, (re)producing unequal geographies and unequal subjects of rights, as well as adversely impacting on the overall conceptualization of rights and further indicating privileged or discriminatory positionalities.

Ayesha Hameed (Writer and artist who explores historical and contemporary borders and migration in her research)

"Black Atlantis: Retrograde Futurism"

On April 29, 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, the coastguards found eleven bodies, naturally desiccated by the sun and the saltwater. The ghost ship was adrift for four months on the Atlantic Ocean; it set sail on Christmas day from the port of Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, full of migrants from Senegal, Guinea Bissau, and Gambia, en route to the Canary Islands. Each of these men paid £890 for their place on the boat... This is an inadequate telling of this story, drawing on the materials and tools at hand to make sense of the elements complicit in the journey of this ship – the weather, ocean currents, and state violence. Hovering between the film and the essay form, there is a questioning of the adequacy of measuring histories and affects connected to crossing; this is where languages emerge to make evident the materiality of the sea, as well as the measurable and immeasurable horror contained in the figure of the ghost ship.

Alessandra Di Maio (Associate Professor of English, University of Palermo, Italy)

While Europe, including Italy, has recently experienced nationalistic drives, Sicily’s capital city Palermo, one of the major ports of refuge for countless migrants arriving in Europe from the African shores, has distinguished itself as an experimental site where to rethink and challenge notions of residence, mobility, citizenship, and belonging. Through a series of political and cultural initiatives, Palermo has become a hub for frontline artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists, who have gathered to explore the historical and contemporary ways in which black voices have been silenced and black bodies have been ambiguously imagined in Western-dominated global culture. Investigating these questions is fundamental to understand what is happening today in the Mediterranean, a crucial site of the African diaspora since the classic era.

Saskia Sassen (Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chairs The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University)

"Three Emergent Migrations: An Epochal Change"

New types of migratory flows are emerging – and they should not be confused with long-established ones. Examining migrant flows at their outset allows us to better understand the complex dynamics behind them. They tell us something about a larger mix of conditions that will only continue to grow, ranging from new types of war and violence to massive losses of habitat. They emerge from sharply delineated conditions operating, respectively, at the city level, at the regional level, and at a global geopolitical level.

Apostolis Fotiadis (Researcher and writer focused on issues related to ethnic conflict, human rights, population movements and politics of the European financial crisis)

"Brutally Legal: How Has Bureaucratic Banality Turned the EU’s External Border Controls in a Violent and Invisible Frontier"

How have the EU and EU MS built an executive capacity and a legal apparatus that allow them to treat human beings on the EU external borders in an inhumane way, without violating EU or International Law? Why has bureaucracy’s banality been as important as brutal abuse in this process? How does this process erode checks and balances and lead to a society where power will be exercised beyond control? After all, can one change the course of this story by merely addressing these questions?

Omar Jabary Salamanca (Research Fellow, Ghent University, Centre for Conflict and Development Studies)

"Weaponizing Infrastructure: Social Reproduction and the Toxic Ecologies of Settler Colonialism"

In 2017, five-year-old Mohammed al-Sayis died after swimming in the sewage-polluted waters of Gaza city’s coastline. He was reportedly the first death caused by sea pollution in the Gaza Strip. This tragedy made visible the complicit relation between Israel’s systematic attack on electricity infrastructure, the protracted water, and sanitation crisis, as well as the long-term effects on public health and the environment. This presentation explores the way in which electricity – an essential infrastructure of social reproduction – became both the target and the weapon in a war that not only victimizes Palestinian bodies, but also threatens the natural and built environments that ensure their biological existence.

Stefanos Levidis (PhD candidate at the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, UK, and a researcher at Forensic Architecture)

"Black Waves, Grey Rocks: The Weaponised Border Natures of the Aegean Archipelago"

“Black Waves, Grey Rocks” follows a shipwrecked vessel carrying migrants in the Aegean Sea, to enquire into the weaponization of “nature” – waves, rocks, currents, and marine life – in the external maritime borders of the EU. The talk considers the legal, military, and discursive strategies through which the dense geography of this archipelago is contorted to confound notions of territory, agency, and responsibility within the context of at-sea migration; at the same time, it attempts to reinstate death by drowning in the Aegean, within situated histories of island exile, ongoing territorial disputes, and the hauntings of colony.

Jackie Wang (PhD candidate at Harvard University in African and African American Studies, USA)

"Captured Voices: Prisoner Voice Prints and the Carceral Laboratory"

This talk will be on voice surveillance, the history of forensic speech science, the prison telecommunications industry, and the racialization of sound. The analysis of the relationship between listening and power will unfold by examining the history of voice surveillance and voiceprinting technology. Techniques to capture the voice for forensic purposes emerged out of the context of the Second World War, were repatriated to the United States for domestic policing during the 1960s and 1970s, and were further developed and taken up by prison telecommunications companies in the 1990s. Companies such as Securus Technologies and Global Tel Link turn the social function of voice into a site of extraction. Drawing from the fields of carceral studies, sound studies, surveillance studies, and black studies, this talk will reveal the ways in which these companies also enable a unidirectional, carceral mode of listening that classifies voices for the purpose of social control.

Nicholas De Genova (Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston, USA)

"Spatial Convulsions, Racial Concussions: The Borders and Boundaries of the 'European' Problem"

Between an asylum system predicated upon suspicion and a border regime ever increasingly dedicated to the intensifying the purview of detention and deportation, on the one hand, and the increasing virulence of anti-immigrant racist populist movements, on the other, Europe – rather than a space of refuge or freedom – has become a space of rejection for most migrants and refugees. Nevertheless, these efforts to erect or reinstate European borders are constantly chasing after the heterogeneity of migrants’ and refugees’ insistent, disobedient, and incorrigible practices of appropriating mobility and making claims to space. Consequently, Europe’s spatial convulsions are persistently transposed into racial concussions as border struggles are re-scaled into the spaces of everyday life, and the full extent of the space of Europe becomes increasingly re-made as a migrant metropolis.

"Contested Musical Geographies of Istanbul"

Istanbul, as a site of musical creativity, is typically described as a crossroads of diverse cultures. This powerful metaphor captures the dynamic movement of peoples, objects, and ideas that dominate the city life from the past to the present and feed into musical creativity. This talk aims to challenge the narrative of cultural syncretism and inclusion, by exploring the points of exclusion and segregation in the musical life of Istanbul. Conceived as ruptures in the musical flows of the city, these points are associated with the intermediary spaces that form Istanbul’s complex musical geographies. Mapping this musical complexity is a means of addressing the recurring issues of production and control of public space in Turkey.

Jackie Abhulimen (Graduate of Development and Peace Studies from the University of Bradford, UK)

"The Second Generation: Contemplations on Hybrid Identities and the Pursuit of Belonging"

In this moment in time, in the Europe of crises, political schisms, and mass movements of people and ideas, where are we on navigating what it means to be “European” and “Other”? Speaking from a place of lived experience, this talk reflects on the movement of the second generation migrants in Greece, where activism and mobilization become mechanisms for survival. Tracing, within the politics of migration, the way in which a generation of hybrid identities and ideas of belonging led to collective action and continue to take shape to this day.

"The Power of Aesthetics and Movement"

Larry Ossei-Mensah will explore the ever-changing definition of contemporary art and movement by looking closely at the work of Faith Ringgold, Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, Bill T. Jones, Okwui Okpokwasili and other artists. Ossei-Mensah will investigate the artists’ ability to leverage the power of aesthetics and movement through the themes of music, place, identity, and art history, and their capacity to redefine our understanding of our shifting global society.

Johny Pitts (Television presenter, writer and photographer from Firth Park, Sheffield, UK)

"Towards a Multiculturalism 2.0"

With the denouncement of multiculturalism from some of the world’s leaders in the last decade, from David Cameron in the UK and Nicolas Sarkozy in France, to Angela Merkel in Germany and Vladimir Putin in Russia, how might we reclaim and reconfigure multiculturalism for the 2020s?

Louis Chude Sokei (Professor of English, George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies, Director of the African American Studies Program, Boston University, USA)

"Within and Against the Skin: New Africans, Old Blacknesses"

While the “Black Mediterranean” continues to trigger political realignments and cultural transformations, it has arguably had little impact on political and cultural activity in the “Black Atlantic.” There is certainly awareness of the crises of race and immigration in that space among Africa, Europe and the Middle East; but it has not instigated the kind of responses that characterized Pan-African sentiment generations ago. This talk explores the silence between the two zones. It is mediated by yet another set of African migrations: those that arrived in the United States at the end of the Civil Rights Movement.