Panel: The intimate geographies of migration: (Countering) postcolonial violence in the urban everyday
Organisers: Dr. Elisabeth Kirndörfer, Lea Haack
In this two-day workshop (Oct 9th and 10th), an interdisciplinary round of scholars working at the intersection of critical migration studies and urban geography/sociology discussed about fragile solidarities, fleeting encounters and the ambivalences of care, peace and friendship in the context of postcolonial violence and difference.
Our workshop was woven around three main conceptual lines: (1) We understand that geopolitical orderings and power dynamics around race and difference display in the intimate and ordinary lives of people and that these latter, in turn, are the grounds onto which geopolitics are reformulated. This transscalar thinking inspired by the “intimacy-geopolitics”-paradigm (Ahmed 2000; Hyndman 2010; Pain & Staeheli 2014; Dempsey 2020) influences our thinking about peace, solidarity and care as part of the micro-logics of everyday life. (2) The workshop forwards a feminist-geography inspired focus on friendshipli-ness and care (Askins 2015; Brannelly & Barnes 2022) – as relational practices of mutual support and resistance towards excluding and racialising systems but also as methodological commitment to ethical research in the context of (forced) migration. (3) The works shared pay ethnographic attention to small and sometimes silent acts of (dis)articulation and withdrawal and non-participation as a form of resistance against powerful hegemonies that shape our research fields.
In the first part of our workshop held at Frauenmuseum Bonn we experimented with zine making (Piepmeier 2009; Vong, 2016) to engage in a collective/creative reflection about our positionalities and of how we locate our research in a conflict-ridden world. Along the working question – “Reserching migration/postcolonial violence now?” – we shared our experiences of current engagements in participatory and activist research in the context of epistemic violence. Given the limited time available, this “kick-off” allowed us to pay attention to the processual nature of our research efforts, especially some of the negotiations, politics, and hopes that they involve, but that are often less visible in scholarly outputs and events.
Followingly, in the panel held at Bonner Universitätsforum in the afternoon, seven presentations were shared and discussed: Dr. Claske Dijkema (University of Applied Sciences Bern) investigated peace – not as a status, but as an embodied, everyday experience. Grounded in her research with racialized women in Switzerland, Claske inspired us to overcome binary conceptions of war and peace, consider their manifold meanings, temporalities and, along the decolonial paradigm, also include non-human beings into this reflection. Ass. Prof. Laavanya Kathiravelu (University of Oslo) located her research on shared precarity between ethnic Malays and immigrants in Singapore in her overall aim to destabilize categories in critical migration research and consider also strategic identity claims. Manuel Insberg (University of Applied Sciences Bern) drew on his ethnographic research with Turkish and Kurdish refugees in Oslo to demonstrate how the experience of shared vulnerability can incite the re-ordering of relationships of power. Sylvana Jahre (Freie Universität Berlin) shared her doctoral research on the Berlin neighborhood program BENN with a focus on care/uncare in the context of refugee politics and the neoliberal city (“uncaring by design”). She discussed care as an ambivalent concept charged with the tension between hope/promise and violence/control. Lea Haack (University of Bonn) delved into the complex relations between arts, knowledge and the body at the example of textile workshops held with Indigenous women artists in London. Her textile-based reflections explored touch/’feeling through’ as a generative form of communication that unhinges the multiple connections – with past and present – contradicting linear conceptions of ‘arrival’ in Western metropoles. Johanna Bastian (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research) explored friendship as a lens to investigate the relations between young migrants, arrival and the city along the question of “what makes a friendly space”. Dr. Elisabeth Kirndörfer explored silence as a political act in the context of race/migration: as a space of (racist) knowledge that undermines young refugees’ presence in the city as well as a powerful articulation of resistance and disengagement.
Overall, according to the immediate feedback we received, the intimate workshop format allowed for an attentive discussion of the papers and a productive discussion of our own engagement with critical ideas, procedures, and concepts in some of the contemporary debates in the field.
Panel discussion: Critical engagements with postcolonial power relations in our research fields and at the University
Organisers: Dr. Elisabeth Kirndörfer, Lea Haack
The debate (around Carl Troll) continues...
As part of a two-day workshop ‘Intimate geographies of migration: (Countering) postcolonial violence in the urban everyday’, the institute's internal process of coming to terms with the (post)colonial entanglements of the GIUBS, triggered by the examination of the figure of Carl Troll, entered the next round. On the panel on the workshop day, the speakers Claske Dijkeema (University of Bern), Laavanya Kathiravelu (Oslo University), Manuel Insberg (University of Bern) and Sylvana Jahre (Free University of Berlin) discussed the process in the context of their own experiences in equivalent processes from different contexts, research institutions and universities. The aim of the event was to introduce the shared research perspectives among the panelist - postcolonial theory and critical migration studies - in view of the topic of the ‘decolonisation’ of institutional structures. The exchange was based on criticism and scepticism regarding this term (‘Decolonising this, decolonising that’, Raghuram & Sondhi 2023), with institutions benefitting from the appropriation of these processes without pursuing the necessary far-reaching structural changes. The questions “What are we decolonising?”, “What are we de-centering?”, are rarely asked; at the same time, the very hierarchical academic structures and procedures in which historical representatives of the GIUB - such as Carl Troll - exerted their influence and enabled colonial and Nazi crimes, would remain intact. Acknowledging that the project of ‘decolonisation’ remains utopian due to a lack of radical restructuring in the academic sector, the panel nevertheless discussed central and long overdue transformations in teaching and research practice, methodologies and learning formats. The participants agreed that the transformation of teaching formats in favour of a pluralistic, democratic and power-critical knowledge production and dissemination should underpin all courses in geography instead of merely being applied in teaching formats that have been set up precisely for this purpose. ‘Decentering the syllabus’, or the centring of postcolonial voices in teaching and research, were discussed as building blocks of a critical agenda.
Obviously, the panel was less concerned with the specific question of how to deal with the “Infostation” dedicated to Carl Troll than with exchanging ideas about strategies for action in the face of the persistence of post-colonial power structures in teaching and research. A keynote speech by Dr Angela Last (Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Prof Dr Kathrin Hörschelmann's working group), in particular, focused on specific areas of application: What are the ways in which we can communicate geographical topics, be they physical geographical or human geographical, in a power-critical and ‘de-centering’ way? How do we, as researchers/teachers, position ourselves in relation to the continuities of ‘white erasures in history’ and the maintenance of white supremacist relations? Angela shared experiences from her History of Geography teaching, which is based on the principle of ‘recognising each other's humanity’ and refuses any paternalism. Unravelling (post)colonial historical entanglements around everyday experiences and artefacts from the students' world has proven to be a way for Angela to use historical geography as a power-critical approach to the present. Manuel suggested tracing the work of Carl Troll, asking, for example: How is the knowledge attributed to Carl Troll currently used in studies on landscape to extract resources and thus perpetuate colonial power relations? Claske also reported on ‘detours’ that can be used in teaching to strategically counter ‘anti-woke-movements’. Another ‘best practice’ example was the acquisition of third-party funding for the financing of anti-racist training in connection with excursions to the Global South.
The panel also highlighted the tension between the possibilities of democratic/participatory learning spaces and a growing sensitivity to the impact of colonial legacies in the present, on the one hand, and the retreat from responsibility for creating spaces for debate about current post-colonial entanglements of academic institutions, on the other.
The war in the Middle East and, in this context, the omnipresent tensions at universities and research institutes, not only in this country, were also very present in the context of the panel, but could only be touched upon, instead of being dealt with in a more focused way. As organisers, we hear the demanding and angry voices in the discussion room and share the hope that the conflict will be addressed in sensitive, mediating and, as often emphasised, democratically organised, discussion rooms.
In accordance with the processual examination of the GIUBS' legacies, our event also ended in openness - without a summary or an all-encompassing statement. We consider it a success to have collected diverse impulses and experiences as “food for thought” in order to continue the learning process, to strengthen solidarity and to further develop the debate, even if the discussion seems difficult.
