‘we refugees’: hardening and softening of borders of everyday life

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‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of the borders of everyday life. Alison Phipps University of Glasgow

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Page 1: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of the borders of everyday

life.

Alison Phipps

University of Glasgow

Page 2: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Gifts are in the Feet

Page 3: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

The Epic Story

Of the hardening of bordersagainst kith and kin

And the softening of borders of skin.

Page 4: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Conditional Hospitality: FRONTEX and the Mediterranean (The Guardian)

Page 5: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? … in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is

History.

(Derek Walcott )

Page 6: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Calais

Page 7: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

States of Exception

Page 8: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

‘They create a wasteland and call it peace.’

Page 9: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Yesterday’s Story

Page 10: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

A life time banon all who

arrive by boat.

On all who havethe gall

to make a ‘dangerousjourney’ towards

Protection.

Page 11: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Another Story

Of the hardeningOf the hardest

of borders

Page 12: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Islamic University Gaza

Page 13: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Borders of FinanceDear TEMPUS (partners)

We are emailing you in reference to Project 517494-TEMPUS-UK-JPMES (2011-2504). We have been asked by the European Commission to provide documentation in regards to costs that have been reported in the financial claim.

You may have already provided documentation for these transactions however, the Commission is asking you to provide these again, and if any documents are in Arabic, they must be translated into English so we can understand the content.

Page 14: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

That morning

Page 15: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life
Page 16: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

On that same day

Page 17: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

We have been here before.

And here we are again.

Page 18: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

We are all border guards now

Health Care

Education

Housing

Employment

Banking

Page 19: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

An Academic Border Guard

Page 20: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Where to go?

And to whom;To think anew the questions

We are posed By all those

Asking “Where to, when no one will have us?

Page 21: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

We Refugees: Arendt (1943)

“The concomity of the European peoples went to pieces, when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.”

(Arendt: p119).

Page 22: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

‘Optimistic’ Refugees Apparently no one wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends. (p111)

Page 23: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Sacred – in the original sense of ‘destined to die’

“Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples – if they keep their identity.” (p.112)

On ne parvient pas deuxfois.

Page 24: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Agamben: on ‘We Refugees’If in the system of the nation-state the refugee represents such a disquieting element, it is above all because […] the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty.

(p.117)

Page 25: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

The Dominant Scripts

“The script is of therapeutic, technocratic, consumer militarism.

[Of Rights and Subjects, Sovereignty and Citizenship.]

And that script has failed.

It cannot make us safeAnd it cannot make us happy.” (Brueggemann)

Page 26: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Citizen’s ‘being-in-exodus’“It is only in a land where the spaces of state will have been perforated and topologically deformed, and the citizen will have learned to acknowledge the refugee that he [sic] himself is, that man’s political survival today will be imaginable.”

Page 27: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Porosity & Perforation

“Mental life doesn’t so constrain us. It is porous, open to the air and light.”

(Scarry, 2003, 34)

Page 28: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

The offer of a Counter-storyPeople don’t change much through doctrine or argument or sheer cognitive appeal.

People don’t change much because of moral appeal – or at least not these days.

Offer of other models or old stories half forgotten, echoes from other peoples and places, tracings. (Brueggemann)

Invitation to a counter-story

Page 29: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

“We Refugees” - a softening

2 ‘puncturing’ events (Badiou).

The change of heart by a politician and a country.

Aylan Kurdi image

Page 30: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

What are we learning? “The new world is not given whole, any more than the new self is given abruptly in psychotherapy. It is given only a little at a time, one poem, one healing one pronouncement, one promise, one commandment.” (Brueggemann)

Page 31: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Perforations: Imagining Inclusive Nationalism

“You have honoured us by making Scotland your home.”

FM Sturgeon

“When people say to me ‘why don’t we take care of our own’ I say – they are our own. This is their home.”

Minister for Europe: Yousaf.

Page 32: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Witness-bearing: Grand Synthe

Page 33: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Arts of Softening and Deterritorializing

Multimodal, multilingual Creative Interventions and Interruptions (translingual practice).

Curation of films, workshops, methods, poetry, drama, devising.

Page 34: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Saumoud: Perforations

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnxZ_tWPOT0

Page 35: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Noyam - Broken World, Broken Word

Page 36: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Sharing the World:

“Meeting a stranger outside of our own boundaries is rather easy, and even satisfies our aspirations, as long as we can return home and appropriate between ourselves what we have in this way discovered.

To be forced to limit and change our home, or our way of being at home, is much more difficult.” (Irigarary)

Page 37: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Page 38: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

Decisions based on ‘Research Evidence’

Page 39: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

“Revolution happens because everyone refused to go home” (Butler)

Page 40: ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and Softening of Borders of Everyday Life

‘Harsh and Exciting’“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --over and over announcing your placein the family of things.” (Mary Oliver)