Copy
View this email in your browser

PCI Newsletter September 2021

Dear colleagues,
 
We hope you are all off to a good start to the new academic year.

In this newsletter, we look back at the recent activities, including the NOISE Summer School 2021 on 'Borders, Boundaries and the Politics of Belonging. Feminist Digital Cartographies' (recordings available). And we look forward to new exciting events (some of them included in this newsletter), CFPs, publications and job offers.  

Sandra Ponzanesi

Director, PCI

Events


Borders, Boundaries and the Politics of Belonging. Feminist Digital Cartographies | NOISE Summer School 2021


30 August - 3 September, Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies, Utrecht University
Coordinators: Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs

This year, the 28th edition of the NOISE Summer School took place online from August 30 to September 3 and focused on cutting-edge scholarship on borders, boundaries and the politics of belonging, by looking at the intersection of feminist cartographies, digital media and affect theories. In this summer school we took not only border zones as an object of inquiry but mobilized the border itself as an epistemological standpoint, or as a method. The Summer School centered around questions such as: how to identify borders politics and border figurations in an interdisciplinary way; how to recognize feminist interventions into the field of digital media studies that challenge the normativity of mainstream media discourses and algorithmic coding; how to apply postcolonial/decolonial/queer interventions to debates on connectivity and belonging by signalling protracted forms of inequality and disparity, and more.

The recordings of the lectures are now available to watch back online. We have included several keynote lectures below. These and all other recordings are available here

The lecture by Dr Roopika Risam, " 'Don't Look Away': Affect, Empathy & the Mobilization of Border Imagery", is available to watch here
The lecture by Dr Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues", is available to watch here
The lecture by Dr Sasha Constanza-Chock, "Design justice: gendered border technologies and the limits of inclusion in sociotechnical systems", is available to watch here
The lecture by Dr Earvin Cabalquinto, "Locked out or locked in? Examining gendered im-mobility in the digital age", is available to watch here
The lecture by Dr Martina Tazzioli, "Extractive humanitarianism: Participatory confinement and unpaid labour", is available to watch here
Other Upcoming Events

FFVT
Comparative Forced Migration and Refugee Studies - reflexive, postcolonial, international | Virtual Workshop


Forced Migration and Refugee Studies: Networking and Knowledge Transfer (FFVT), 28-29 September 2021

For long, forced migration and refugee studies strongly rested on case studies whereas comparative research was absent (Harrell-Bond 1998, Chatty 2007). Meanwhile, an increasing number of studies began shifting this trend (e.g. MMC 2018Wacker 2019). But the diversity of designs, contexts and data continues to complicate direct comparison and case studies remain prevalent. Only in refugee policy and refugee integration studies are comparative approaches more common. Further to this, case studies are often either conducted in the Global North or from a Global North perspective; the Global South and Global East are less well researched, though we see more and more studies on and in these regions; in particular, postcolonial approaches inspire this.

Indeed, temporally and regionally comparative perspectives on similar or different conditions, practices of forced migration, or cohorts or types of refugees as well as features such as commonalities and differences in agency, resilience, vulnerability, transnationalism, family situations, and so on are an important method (e.g. Kleist 2018). This facilitates recognising trajectories and patterns as well as interdependencies but also notorious blind spots or hegemonic practices of knowledge production and subsequently the identification of new research questions.

This workshop shall be devoted mainly to forced migration and displacement processes and the underlying causes/drivers/motivations, infrastructures, experiences, particularities, geography etc. but less so to policy. It aims to promote and strengthen the recent shifts towards a comparative approach as well as generally a reflexive approach in the field. To this end, it wishes to obtain a better overview over the state-of-the-art of comparative forced migration studies. This shall also facilitate sketching some key parameters of comparative forced migration and refugee studies. Another objective is to link comparative migration studies to refugee studies. Equally important is it to increase the visibility or even enhance perspectives of the Global South and East.

 

For more information, see here

German Development Institute – The Security ...
Contested Categories: Issues at the Intersection of Development and Forced Migration Studies | Virtual Workshop


German Development Institute, 4-5 October 2021

The aggregation of information is a mundane procedure in research processes. Clustering, labelling and categorising are basic tools used by researchers to structure data and order information with the objective to systematically make sense of “the world out there”. This process is crucial for reaching higher abstraction levels and create broader meanings of the data generated. However, research categories always emerge in a specific context and time, and therefore, it is not surprising that they are often contested by diverging perspectives, revisited and replaced. Hence, categories seldom endure longer time periods.

This workshop addresses the critique of categories and the debates about them in development research and considers their relevance and utility for forced migration studies (FMS). For this purpose, three critically discussed categories in recent years are used as examples: “global South and global North”, “new actors – self-empowerment and emancipation of marginalised groups”, and “digitalisation”. For better contextualisation, the workshop will be accompanied by a keynote lecture on categorisations in development and FMS.


For more information and to register for the workshop, see here


Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) Research Day 


Groningen, 8 October 2021, 14:00-18:00. 

This event is planned as hybrid, but will move online if necessary.

After skipping one year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the OSL Research Day is back, and will take place in Groningen on 8 October 2021! The Research Day aims to celebrate and cultivate OSL’s sense of community, and hopes to stimulate more collaboration between literary scholars and existing research groups in the Netherlands. While literature is our primary focus, we explicitly encourage multidisciplinary research.


Panels: 


To register for this event, sign up via for onsite or online attendance via the OSL website here, or by sending an email to osl@rug.nlFor more information, see here


Global Mobilities, Securities and Social Justice: Transnational Objectives About Theories, Discourses, and Empirical Research | MIGROBAL Winter School


Utrecht University, 1 November - 10 November 2021
Course director: Dr Veronika Nagy


The number of refugees and forced migrants in the world has increased by record numbers. Currently, one out of every 100 people has been forced to leave everything behind— either fleeing their homeland for an international destination or displaced within their own country. Over 25 million of them are refugees; the rest are internally displaced and stateless people.

The focus of this Winter School will more specifically lie on media implications, gender conflicts and technological challenges in the migration domain, with a particular interest in digital governance and the increasing role of the Global South. 

We welcome students, researchers, and experts to think of and present their research questions related to these themes. The scope of this theme is not restricted to specific regions, like Europe, the US or Africa, but includes the knowledge and experience of scholars from different continents. The scope will also be broader than refugees alone. It will also concern other types of forced migrants, like displaced persons and victims of trafficking.

Topics to be discussed include:

  • Existing theories: What theories have been used to analyze forced migration? How can they be critically reviewed?
  • Students’ empirical work: participants will be asked to translate their findings from their own research and relate them to global debates of migration and forced migration issues.
  • Refugee policies: what are the fundamental premises upon which refugee policies are based?
  • Solutions: participants will be encouraged to think about new ways to resolve these problems. They will be asked to, for example, define and determine solution based alternative programming pathways and synergies for GOs, academics and non-state actors.

Confirmed keynote speakers: 


For more information, see here.  


Global implications of migratory movements: Human mobility beyond the Eurocentric perspective | Hybrid Conference


Utrecht University, 11 November 2021-12 November 2021

The focus on westward mobilities and the aftermath of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ expanded the Eurocentric interpretation of migratory movements and their consequences both for the populations on the move and the host societies.

Such Eurocentric assertion can be traced in media and political discourse, but it also pervades the very notion of mobility in terms of its linearity, temporality and trajectory. By employing a global, cross-pollinating perspective rather than a strictly Eurocentric approach, the conference “Global implications of migratory movements: Human mobility beyond the Eurocentric perspective” aims to provide a platform that questions, critiques, counters and deconstructs the assumptions and essentialisms of the Western gaze towards the migrant-Other and, at a wider scale, towards the phenomenon of migration itself. This international conference seeks to synthesize knowledge and experience gained by the vastly different forced displacements around the globe’. Rather than compare them, we are encouraging a context-specific understanding of how to mitigate the long-standing challenges that seem to come with migratory influxes.

This hybrid event deals with questions, such as how migratory pressure is framed by narratives of Security, Rights and Fears; how technologies shape transnational movements of people, or how we can critically address the diversity of human flows to provide global solutions. Therefore, this conference aims to facilitate discussions that circumvent the interjection between different social and legal categories of migration by building a ‘global agenda’ with professionals, experts, NGOs and policy makers from an interdisciplinary approach.


Confirmed keynote speakers: 

Register for the conference here. For more information, see here


Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citzen Media in Europe | PIN (Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics Network | 26 - 27 May 2022


Organized by Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics Network (PIN)
Ca'Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with Alborg University


Confirmed speaker: Prof. Lilie Chouliaraki (London School of Economics)

This conference wants to interrogate the proliferation of digital media and global culture, and the changes happening in public intellectual engagements. From the adoration of the single (often male, often white) genius to the anonymity of diverse, affective publics, a postcolonial perspective invites contemporary public engagement to have many faces and multiple voices, and addressing new issues such as the environmental crisis and the resurgence of racism. Creativity and art can play a significant role in this development. Performance and visual expressions in the European space interpellate the situated public, but also produce transnational political dialogue and travel across digital space. Embodied performances challenge the cerebral stereotype and classical conception of what public engagement is and should be. Moreover, digital platforms have made available space for expressions that break the form and formulas of public and political speech. However, despite the expansion of public participation, social divisions based on race, gender, sexuality and able-bodiedness still hold sway and begs the question of positionality in relations to institutions, in the different fields of art and media, when it comes to political and social change.

The edited volume and conference envision postcolonial citizen media and art as practices and products encompassing a wide range of expressions: from poetry to journalism to Twitter-writing; from art to graffiti to Instagram-activism; and from celebrity activism to the uprising of “affective publics” (Papacharissi 2015).  

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Migrant social media narratives (visual, aural, performative)
  • Exiled artists’ political expressions of citizenship and belonging
  • Social movements’ visual tactics and digital strategies
  • Celebrity activism and co-optation on gender, race and postcolonial issues
  • Citizen journalism and postcolonial counterpublics
  • Street art, performance and public engagement in postcolonial Europe
  • Questions of citizenship, voice and witnessing, in a postcolonial perspective
  • Media activism, academic activism, artivism for a postcolonial Europe
  • Postcolonial media and art interventions in the environmental crisis

The publication and conference is part of the Postcolonial Intellectuals and Their European Publics Network, (PIN), which is funded by the NWO. The network brings together international and interdisciplinary scholars, activists, and artists to explore the changing face and voice of the European intellectuals in a postcolonial Europe. This publication and conference are jointly organized by Shaul Bassi and Sabrina Marchetti (Centre for the Humanities and Social Change), Bolette Blaagaard (Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Copenhagen) and Sandra Ponzanesi (Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University).

The conference will take place in Venice on the 26-27th of May 2022. The volume will be published by Ca’ Foscari University Press as Open Access eBook in the Summer 2022.

 

For more information, see here. For more information on PIN, see here

Call for Papers


Call for Abstracts: Queer Death Studies Reader


Edited by Nina Lykke, Marietta Radomska and Tara Mehrabi
Deadline: 1 November 2021

The planned reader will gather a wide range of contributions to the field of Queer Death Studies (QDS). This is an emerging, transdisciplinary field of study which takes research on death, dying, and mourning in new directions, inspired by feminist, posthumanist, decolonial, anti-racist, queer, trans, body- and affect-theoretical scholarship, art and activism (Radomska, Mehrabi and Lykke 2020).

With this call, we invite abstracts from researchers, students, artists and activists who see their research and activities as aligned with critiques of the necropowers operating in the contemporary world, and who want to contribute to queering, decolonising and posthumanising death and the onto-epistemololgies and politics conventionally framing death.

Thematic clusters:

  • Queering Death: Rethinking life/death ecologies
  • Histories of necropowers and Anthropocene necropolitics
  • Decolonising death
  • Posthumanising death
  • Demedicalising death
  • Politics and Ethics of Mourning
  • Alternative Spiritual, Aesthetic and Arts Activist Approaches to Death and After-life
 

Abstracts can be sent to ninly@fastmail, cc: marietta.radomska@liu.se and Tara.Mehrabi@kau.se. More information and the full call for papers can be found here

Publications

Networked Refugees: Palestinian Reciprocity and Remittances in the Digital Age


Nadya Hajj
Published by University of California Press, October 2021

 

Networked Refugees by Nadya Hajj

Almost 68.5 million refugees in the world today live in a protection gap, the chasm between protections stipulated in the Geneva Convention and the abrogation of those responsibilities by states and aid agencies. With dwindling humanitarian aid, how do refugee communities solve collective dilemmas, like raising funds for funeral services, or securing other critical goods and services? 

In Networked Refugees, Nadya Hajj finds that Palestinian refugees utilize Information Communication Technology platforms to motivate reciprocity—a cooperative action marked by the mutual exchange of favors and services—and informally seek aid and connection with their transnational diaspora community.  Using surveys conducted with Palestinians throughout the diaspora, interviews with those inside the Nahr al Bared Refugee camp in Lebanon, and data pulled from online community spaces, these findings push back against the cynical idea that online organizing is fruitless, emphasizing instead the productivity of these digital networks.

 

For more information, see here

Borders as Infrastructure: The Technopolitics of Border Control


Huub Dijstelbloem
Published by MIT Press, August 2021

 

Borders as Infrastructure

In Borders as Infrastructure, Huub Dijstelbloem brings science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology, to the study of borders and international human mobility. Taking Europe's borders as a point of departure, he shows how borders can transform and multiply and how they can mark conflicts over international orders. Borders themselves are moving entities, he claims, and with them travel our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. The philosophies of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk provide a framework for Dijstelbloem's discussion of the material and morphological nature of borders and border politics.

Dijstelbloem offers detailed empirical investigations that focus on the so-called migrant crisis of 2014–2016 on the Greek Aegean Islands of Chios and Lesbos; the Europe surveillance system Eurosur; border patrols at sea; the rise of hotspots and “humanitarian borders”; the technopolitics of border control at Schiphol International Airport; and the countersurveillance by NGOs, activists, and artists who investigate infrastructural border violence. Throughout, Dijstelbloem explores technologies used in border control, including cameras, databases, fingerprinting, visual representations, fences, walls, and monitoring instruments. Borders can turn places, routes, and territories into “zones of death.” Dijstelbloem concludes that Europe's current relationship with borders renders borders—and Europe itself—an “extreme infrastructure” obsessed with boundaries and limits.

 

For more information, see here

Special Issue: "Somali Diaspora and Digital practices: Gender, Media and Beloning"


Edited by Sandra Ponzanesi
Journal of Global Diaspora & Media, 2(1), 2021

Journal of Global Diaspora & Media

  • Sandra Ponzanesi, "Somali diaspora and digital belonging: Introduction", pp. 3-15. Available here
  • Idil Osman, "Illuminating gendered and postcolonial contexts within Somali digital practice", pp. 17-21. Available here
  • Donya Alinejad and Sandra Ponzanesi, "The multi-sitedness of Somali diasporic belonging: Comparative notes on Somali migrant women's digital practices", pp. 23-37. Available here
  • Laura Candidatu, "Diasporic mothering and Somali diaspora formation in the Netherlands", pp. 39-55. Available here
  • Melis Mevsimler, "Second-generation British-Somali women: The translocal nexus of London and global diaspora", pp. 57-72. Available here
  • Claudia Minchilli, "Localizing diasporic digital media practices: Social stratification and community making among Somali women living in Rome", pp. 73-89. Available here.  
  • Ilse van Liempt, "Response to Special Issue", pp. 91-97. Available here


For more information, see here

Vacancies
Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration
University of Oxford
Deadline: 11 October 2021

Assistant Professor, Media Studies
University of Chicago
Deadline: 15 October 2021

Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Southern California
Deadline: 1 November 2021

Chair (Full Professor) of Intercultural Communication
Utrecht University
Deadline: 7 November 2021

PhD position 'Conceptions of Europe in Early Modern Literature, 1517-1713' 
Utrecht University
Deadline: 8 November 2021 

Assistant Professor of Indigenous Media, Cultural Sovereignty and Decolonization
University of California, Santa Cruz
Deadline: 1 December 2021

The activities of the PCI are organized in collaboration with The Graduate Gender Programme and Institution for Open Society (Hub Gender and Diversity)

 
Like us on Facebook Like us on Facebook
Visit the Postcolonial Studies Initiative website Visit the Postcolonial Studies Initiative website
Subscribe to this newsletter Subscribe to this newsletter
Forward to a friend Forward to a friend
Copyright © 2016 PCI, All rights reserved. 
You are receiving this email as a member of PCI. 

Contact:
Sandra Ponzanesi

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list






This email was sent to <<Email Address>>
why did I get this?    unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences
Postcolonial Studies Initiative · Muntstraat 2A · Utrecht, 3512EV · Netherlands

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp