"The Vanishing Truth of Refugees"
Wednesday, 15 June 2011, 5pm
Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford Department of International Development,
3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB
Professor Didier Fassin, a leading medical anthropologist, is the James
D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study
of Princeton, Director of Studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris and President of the French Medical Committee for Exiles.
In this lecture Professor Didier Fassin will explore how, sixty years
after the signature of the Geneva Convention, asylum is progressively
being emptied of its original signification in Western Europe and North
America. First, the increasing assimilation of asylum and immigration
serves as a justification for the suspicion towards refugees, the
paradox being that it is in the name of an idealized view of asylum that
refugees are denied its protection. As their testimony is systematically
disqualified, more documents, medical certificates, psychological
evidence, and material proof are required, thus confirming the
delegitimization of their voice. Second, the progressive recognition of
intimate violence, including sexual orientation and genital mutilations,
as rationales for asylum obscures the dramatic discrediting of
traditional political persecution, systematically contested by
protection officers and judges.
This shift from the public to the private spheres is all the more
effective in that it is presented as opposing a self-valourizing
enlightened vision of the world to the depreciated archaic prejudices
against homosexuals and girls. Based on a decade of empirical research
on asylum, mostly in France, the lecture will discuss and confront the
abstract truth of asylum and the concrete truth of refugees, thus
questioning the ethical foundations of contemporary societies.
http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/the-vanishing-truth-of-refugees
RSVP: Heidi El-Megrisi
Tel: 01865 281728/9 email: [log in to unmask]
Please send all replies to: [log in to unmask]
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