Dear colleagues,
 
PCI celebrates its 10^th anniversary!
 
It seems like yesterday when we started, but the Postcolonial Studies Initiative celebrates its 10^th anniversary this year. On 15 September 2010 we had a wonderful launch at Utrecht University with a keynote speech from Prof. Paul Gilroy. We can share the happy pics as a form of collective memory and hopefully we will find a more opportune moment to celebrate properly in an embodied way: http://www.postcolonialstudies.nl/2010/09/pci-successfully-launched-on-september.html. 
 

Despite the changes in academia and society, the PCI is still staying true to its initial mission: to provide a platform for research into postcolonial issues, from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, critically engaging with a variety of global contexts and issues. The PCI reaches out to undergraduates as well as graduate students, scholars, artists and activists, striving to provide an intellectual hub at the local, national and international levels. We are blessed with a thriving and engaged community. I’m looking forward to many more years of collaborations, sharing and participation.

Sandra Ponzanesi
Director, PCI

Despite these unprecedented times and the difficulty of getting together in a cinema/theatre room, we would like to launch our 10th Postcolonial Studies Initiative Film Series nonetheless, albeit in a different format with screening online. We will come with monthly suggestions and recommendations, often available online and with free access, sometimes available for rental. Colleagues will briefly comment on their choice and pick of the film to share with the PCI communities.  The 10th PCI Film Series, with monthly recommendations, draws on a variety of different contexts in our global postcolonial world, reflecting on its political, cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges.

Movie of the month: Honeyland (2019)

Suggested by Dr. Christine Quinan (MCW, Gender Studies, Utrecht University)

When a nomadic family move in and break Honeyland’s basic rule, the last female wild beekeeper in Europe must save the bees and restore natural balance.

This month's PCI movie of the month was suggested by Dr. Christine Quinan: “Set in the mountains of North Macedonia, Honeyland offers an intimate portrait of one of Europe's few remaining wild beekeepers as she is confronted with threats to her livelihood. The interpersonal tensions we witness throughout the course of the film beautifully -- if also heartbreakingly -- illustrate the challenges of preserving natural resources and cultural traditions in the face of human-inflicted destruction. This cinematographically stunning documentary is well worth watching, particularly for the timely warning it offers for negotiating the delicate balance between land, environment, and human behavior."

• Directors: Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska (North Macedonia , 2019, 90 min)
• Spoken languages: Turkish, Macedonian
• Subtitles in: English
• Watch the film trailer here

At Sundance Film Festival 2019, Honeyland received the world cinema grand jury prize: documentary, world cinema documentary special jury award for cinematography, and world cinema dramatic special jury award for originality. Honeyland is the first film to be nominated for an Oscar in the category best documentary and best international feature (the category formerly known as best foreign-language film). Honeyland was positively reviewed by the LA Times, The New York Times, The Guardian and Variety. For more reviews, see here. 

For more information on the film, visit the official website here. Honeyland is accessible via IDFA. 

Webinar "Migrant lives in pandemic times" | With Professor Nando Sigona

While the first wave of Covid-19 took many by surprise, it seems that the pandemic and the diverse national and local policies that are designed to tackle its further spread will keep staying with us for a while. This time, we as migration researchers, migrant civil society organisations and migration policy makers can prepare ourselves.

Earlier this year, Mieke Kox and llse van Liempt documented in a triptych and as part of an ongoing research project the impact of the initial Covid-19 outbreak and its related policies on undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. In our webinar on 18 September, we will take the time to further discuss the impact of the pandemic and pandemic-policies on migrants and on migrant and migration policies. On the preliminary programme:

• Professor Nando Sigona (University of Birmingham) starting off the discussion with an agenda setting presentation on migration research during and after the pandemic.

• Associate Professor Maggi Leung (Utrecht University) following up with reflections and preliminary insights from her research project 'COVID: Countering the Virus: Discrimination and Protestation in Europe’

• Jan Braat (senior policy advisor migration, diversity and integration @ Utrecht municipality), to be confirmed, following up with reflections and insights from the policy making perspective

• De Voorkamer/Stichting Collective Nouns: reflections and insights on the impact of the pandemic on the creation of inclusive spaces in the city.

The webinar is a public event and there will be plenty of room for questions and discussion. For more information, see here. To register, please contact migration@uu.nl. 

Forum on European Culture 2020

De Balie and DutchCulture present the third edition of the Forum on European Culture. This year's theme is We, The People. Artists, thinkers and activists from around Europe will converge from 17 to 20 September 2020 to examine the notion of a ‘European people’. The festival is held throughout Amsterdam as well as online, as a celebration of European art and culture, with theatre, music, lectures, films, photographs and dialogues.
 

Macarena Gómez-Barris - The Extractive Zone | Thinking With

In this conversation, as part of the RCMC Thinking With series, Macarena Gómes-Barris will discuss her work notably in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke UP, 2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide (UC Press, 2018). 

This conversation is part of the Caring Matters conference, which is part of the international collaborative research project Taking Care - Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care. 

RCMC invite Gómez-Barris to think with us for she insists on theorizing the violence of extractive economies. In ethnographic museums, the RCMC are interested in “mining the museum,” in connecting the objects within the collections to longer histories of resource extraction, of species extinction, of human and cultural degradation. At the same time, thinking the “extractive zone” takes these collections as possible sites for re-imagining other more caring relationships, more careful futures. 

RCMC’s Thinking With is a conversational series that makes a commitment to a certain kind of collaborative criticality. This project complements several of our existing initiatives, as well as our attentiveness to the notion of “togetherness.” Thinking With arises out of the NMVW’s mission to contribute to world citizenship. This ambition involves reflecting on how we might live with and among others in the world in more just and equitable ways, but also in ways that acknowledge that we do so ‘from’ drastically different subjectivities and vantage points. Thinking With then offers a form of joined-up problem solving that imagines a future that we can only fashion together. As such, Thinking With is a series that includes book talks, conversations with authors and makers, and specialists in the many fields that inform museum practice.

Under Erasure: Statues and Violence | AISCLI Webinar Series 2020

AISCLI (Associazione italiana di studi sulle cultura e letterature di Lingua Inglese) welcomes AISCLI members and others interested to participate in the second AISCLI Webinar. In this session, Ana Cristina Mendes (Universidade de Lisboa) and respondent Mirko Casagranda (Università delle Calabria) will present and discuss 'Under Erasure: Statues and Violence'. 

Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday | 21-22-23 April 2021

• Submission deadline for panels: 31 January 2021
• Submission deadline for abstracts: 15 February 2021

• Paul Gilroy (University College London)
• Engin Isin (Queen Mary, University of London)
• Nicholas de Genova (University of Houston)
• Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Melbourne)
• Saskia Witteborn (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.
 
This international conference focuses on the connection between the media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also subjects individual as well as groups to increased datafied migration management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression.
 
This conference pays particular attention to the everyday use of digital media for the support of transnational lives, emotional bonds and cosmopolitan affiliations, focusing also on the the role digital media play in shaping local/urban and national diasporic formations. This is because it becomes increasingly important to give everyday digital media usage a central role in investigations of transnational belonging, digital intimacy, diasporic community (re)production, migrant subject formation, long-distance political participation, urban social integration and local/national self-organization.
 
Therefore we need to examine individual and collective user practices within the wider historical and cultural contexts of media studies, cultural studies and postcolonial cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity, geographies and the everyday. This also creates new challenges for cross-disciplinary dialogues that require an integration of ethnography with digital methods and critical data studies in order to look at the formation of identity and experience, representation, community building, and creating spaces of belongingness.


The conference is part of the ERC project CONNECTINGEUROPE, Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging: http://connectingeuropeproject.eu/
 

Europe's Past, Present, and Future: Utopias and Dystopias | 24-26 June 2021

NIAS Conference: Studies of Belonging | 9-11 June 2021

Sex and Gender Dimension in Frontier Research | ERC Workshop
 

Special Issue: Migration, Digital Media and Emotion | International Journal of Cultural Studies

Contributions include: 

• Donya Alinejad, Sandra Ponzanesi. "Migrancy and digital mediations of emotion." (pp. 621-638)
• Raelene Wilding, Loretta Baldassar, Shashini Gamage, Shane Worrell, Samiro Mohamud. "Digital media and the affective economies of transnational families." (pp. 639-655)
• Celine Meyers, Pragna Rugunanan. "Mobile-mediated mothering from a distance: A case study of Somali mothers in Port Elizabeth, South Africa." (pp. 656-673)
• Jolynna Sinanan, Catherine Gomes. " 'Everybody needs friends': Emotions, social networks and digital media in the friendships of international students." (pp. 674-691)
• Haili Li. "Transnational togetherness through Rela: Chinese queer women's practices for maintaining ties with the homeland." (pp. 692-708)
• Mine Gencel Bek, Patricia Prieto Blanco. "(Be)Longing through visual narrative: Mediation of (dis)affect and formation of politics through photographs and narratives of migration at DiasporaTürk." (pp. 709-727)
• Silvia Almenara-Niebla. "Making digital 'home-camps': Mediating emotions among the Sahrawi refugee diaspora." (pp. 728-744)
• Marloes Annette Geboers, Chad Thomas Van De Wiele. "Regimes of visibility and the affective affordances of Twitter." (pp. 745-765)
• Earvin Charles Cabalquinto, Guy Wood-Bradley. "Migrant platformed subjectivity: rethinking the mediation of transnational affective economies via digital connectivity services." (pp. 787-802) 
• Beatrice Zani. "WeChat, we sell, we feel: Chinese women's emotional petit capitalism. (pp. 803-820)

Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming

Kishonna L. Gray
Published by LSU Press, September 2020
 

In Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers—some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed—affect their experiences of gaming.

The normalization of whiteness and masculinity in digital culture inevitably leads to isolation, exclusion, and punishment of marginalized people. Yet, Gray argues, we must also examine the individual struggles of prejudice, discrimination, and microaggressions within larger institutional practices that sustain the oppression. These “new” racisms and a complementary colorblind ideology are a kind of digital Jim Crow, a new mode of the same strategies of oppression that have targeted black communities throughout American history.

Drawing on extensive interviews that engage critically with identity development and justice issues in gaming, Gray explores the capacity for gaming culture to foster critical consciousness, aid in participatory democracy, and effect social change. Intersectional Tech is rooted in concrete situations of marginalized members within gaming culture. It reveals that despite the truths articulated by those who expose the sexism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia that are commonplace within gaming communities, hegemonic narratives continue to be privileged. This text, in contrast, centers the perspectives that are often ignored and provides a critical corrective to notions of gaming as a predominantly white and male space.

For more information, see here. 

Is Free Speech Racist?

Gavan Titley
Published by Wiley & Sons Ltd, July 2020
 

The question of free speech is never far from the headlines and frequently declared to be in crisis. Starting from the observation that such debates so often focus on what can and cannot be said in relation to race, Gavan Titley asks why racism has become so central to intense disputes about the status and remit of freedom of speech.

Is Free Speech Racist? moves away from recurring debates about the limits of speech to instead examine how the principle of free speech is marshalled in today's multicultural and intensively mediated societies. This involves tracing the ways in which free speech has been mobilized in far-right politics, in the recycling of 'race realism' and other discredited forms of knowledge, and in the politics of immigration and integration. Where there is intense political contestation and public confusion as to what constitutes racism and who gets to define it, 'free speech' has been adopted as a primary mechanism for amplifying and re-animating racist ideas and racializing claims. As such, contemporary free speech discourse reveals much about the ongoing life of race and racism in contemporary society.

For more information, see here. 

Mediating Multiculturalism: Digital Storytelling and the Everyday Ethnic

Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing.
There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. 

This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated?


For more information, see here. 

Digital Media Practices in Households: Kinship through Data

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contemporary household dynamics.

This book is part of the series MediaMatters, an international book series published by Amsterdam University Press on current debates about emerging and transforming cultural practices that engage with (new) media technologies. Contributions to the series critically analyse and theorise the materiality, spatiality, mobility and performativity of these practices in book projects that engage with today’s dynamic digital media culture.

This book is digitally accessible here. For more information, see here. 

Intersectionality in Digital Humanities

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s, intersectionality makes the case that dimensions of identity, such as gender and race, cannot be understood in isolation from each other because they work together to shape lived experience. As digital humanities has expanded in scope and content, questions of how to negotiate the overlapping influences of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and other dimensions that shape data, archives, and methodologies have come to the fore. Taking up these concerns, the authors in this volume explore their effects on the methodological, political, and ethical practices of digital humanities. Essays examine intersectionality from a range of positions: the influence of overlapping identities on scholars within the digital humanities community; how the fields in which they work are subject to competing tensions created by intersecting power structures within digital humanities and academia; and the methodological possibilities and scholarly potential for intersectionality as a framing theory in digital humanities scholarship.


For more information, see here. 

Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty: Refugee Governance in Lebanon

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide and is central to European policies of outsourcing migration management. Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first book to critically and comprehensively explore the parallels between the country’s engagement with the recent Syrian refugee influx and the more protracted Palestinian presence.

Drawing on fieldwork, qualitative case-studies, and critical policy analysis, it questions the dominant idea that the haphazardness, inconsistency, and fragmentation of refugee governance are only the result of forced displacement or host state fragility and the related capacity problems. It demonstrates that the endemic ambiguity that determines refugee governance also results from a lack of political will to create coherent and comprehensive rules of engagement to address refugee ‘crises.’

Building on emerging literatures in the fields of critical refugee studies, hybrid governance, and ignorance studies, it proposes an innovative conceptual framework to capture the spatial, temporal, and procedural dimensions of the uncertainty that refugees face and to tease out the strategic components of the reproduction and extension of such informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. In developing the notion of a ‘politics of uncertainty,’ ambiguity is explored as a component of a governmentality that enables the control, exploitation, and expulsion of refugees.

For more information, see here. 

Theorising Cultures of Equality

This book sets out a theoretical framework for thinking about equality as a cultural artefact and process, drawing on work from the GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project.

In revisiting and reframing conventional questions about in/equality it considers the processes through which in/equalities have come to be regarded as issues of public concern, the various ways that equalities have been historically defined, and how those ideas and imaginings of equalities are produced, embodied, objectified, recognized and contested in and through a variety of cultural practices and sites.

Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors, the book will be of interest to scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, and women’s and gender studies.

For more information, see here. 

The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema
 

The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema explores contemporary debates around the concepts of 'Europe' and 'European identity' through an examination of recent European films dealing with various aspects of globalization (the refugee crisis, labour migration, the resurgence of nationalism and ethnic violence, neoliberalism, post-colonialism) with a particular attention to the figure of the migrant and the ways in which this figure challenges us to rethink Europe and its core Enlightenment values (citizenship, justice, ethics, liberty, tolerance, and hospitality) in a post-national context of ephemerality, volatility, and contingency that finds people desperately looking for firmer markers of identity. The book argues that a compelling case can be made for re-orienting the study of contemporary European cinema around the figure of the migrant viewed both as a symbolic figure (representing post-national citizenship, urbanization, the 'gap' between ethics and justice) and as a figure occupying an increasingly central place in European cinema in general rather than only in what is usually called 'migrant and diasporic cinema'. By drawing attention to the structural and affective affinities between the experience of migrants and non-migrants, Europeans and non-Europeans, Trifonova shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate stories about migration from stories about life under neoliberalism in general

For more information, see here. 

Professor of Sociology
Amstedam University
Deadline: 20 September 2020

Assistant Professor in Global Transformations and Governance Challenges
Leiden University
Deadline: 1 October 2020

Assistant Professor Critical Theory
University of California, Berkeley
Deadline: 15 October 2020

Assistant Professor, Black Diaspora in the Era of Atlantic Slave Trade
Dartmouth College
Deadline: 15 October 2020