Asylum & Refugee Seminar Series, Oxford University, 13-15 October 2015
Speaker: Benjamin N Lawrance (Barber B. Conable Jr. Endowed Chair in International Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, USA)
Tuesday, 13 October 2015 at 1-2 pm
Location: Seminar Room 3, Oxford Department of International Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB
Africa after Neo-Abolition: Asylum Politicization, Expert Testimony, and the Legacy of Anti-Trafficking Advocacy
African trafficking survivors struggle with anti-immigrant rhetoric and migration securitization in throughout the Global North. Globalization has elevated the importance of documentation; individuals fleeing trafficking face high thresholds to prove captive, coerced, or imprisoned status. This talk explores asylum politicization in Europe and North America and the role of millennial anti-trafficking advocacy in resisting it. The data sets, interviews, analyses, and digital documentation assembled by neo-abolitionist organizations such as Terre des Hommes, Anti-Slavery International, and Invisible Children, and government agencies have become a country conditions archive, a rich repository anchoring asylum and refugee claims from those seeking protection from traffickers and slaveholders. Asylum claims (from Togo, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria) provide unique insight into how trafficking survivors struggle for recognition as social persons. This talk explores how experts and lawyers in the US and the UK mobilize documentation to resist anti-migration policy. In the absence of corroborating testimony, trafficking survivors in asylum courts struggle to prove their slave status, not to attain their freedom. The archive of contemporary slavery operates as a powerful evidentiary counterweight to securitized migration policies and anti-asylum-seeker discourses.
Wednesday, 14 October 2015 at 5-6.30 pm
Location: Seminar Room 1, Oxford Department of International Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB
History, Present and Center: Boko Haram, Gender Violence Asylum Claims, and the Mimetic Novelty of Africa
Nigerian Isa Muazu came to the UK in 2007 on a visitor’s visa. He overstayed, was detained, and applied for asylum based on his fear of death at the hands of the West African Islamist entity Boko Haram. Asylum-seekers, as a group, appear cognizant of the disbelief with which their personal testimony is often received, and the limitations of expertise to substantiate their narratives. As a result they employ diverse and creative strategies to anchor their personal testimonies or broaden them beyond their narrow personal experience. This talk explores how, by reshaping personal testimonies of violence and persecution into broader narratives about gender-based violence at the hands of Boko Haram, asylum-seekers actuate a mimetic strategy drawing on powerful historical tropes about Africa and Africans. Although migration authorities globally acknowledge incontrovertible evidence of Boko Haram’s violence, asylum and refugee anxieties narrated in immigration courts in the UK and US are often about future hypothetical jeopardy, not enacted historical trauma. Absent the mimetic novelty of Boko Haram, and as Plato conjectured, the poetics of asylum-seekers risk being exposed as little more than “simple narration.”
Thursday, 15 October 2015, 5-7 pm
Location: Pavilion Room, St. Antony’s College, 62 Woodstock Rd, Oxford OX2 6JF
African Asylum Claims, the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, and the Reception of the Supernatural in Refugee Status Determination
In 2009 a Beninese vodou priest’s adherents kidnapped Dopé and brought her to the atikevodou shrine of Sakpata. Dopé, originally from the village of Cové, was an educated, married woman living in Cotonou. She fled to the US to seek asylum. She believed her experiences were the result of her childhood betrothal as trokosi, a form of indebted curse exacted for her mother’s infidelity. Dopé’s narrative was troubled her lawyers; they feared no judge would consider it plausible or credible. They reframed her claim by documenting misogynistic forced marriage practices and child abuse, child slavery, and the widespread belief in levirate. Her lawyers chose conventional arguments and pursued established precedent as a strategy to avoid foregrounding the discussion of vodou, routinely considered a form of witchcraft by adjudicators. This talk follows the experiences of four women (from Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Ghana), all of whom invoked the supernatural in their asylum claims in the UK and US. Whereas religious persecution is an established basis for refugee status, African asylum seekers who invoke the magic, juju, vodou, and other supernatural terminology face a high threshold to establish the legitimacy of their narratives. The constraints of refugee convention compel lawyers to reformulate witchcraft asylum claims into gender violence claims, and in so doing, the refugee conventions subject terrified individuals to bureaucratic violence.
About the Speaker
Benjamin N. Lawrance is the Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Professor of International Studies, and Professor of History and Anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His recent books include Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (Yale 2014), African Asylum at a Crossroads, with Iris Berger, Tricia Hepner Redeker, Jo Tague, and Meredith Terretta (Ohio 2015), Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony with Galya Ruffer (Cambridge 2015), and Trafficking in Slavery's Wake (Ohio 2012) with Richard L. Roberts. His forthcoming book is entitled Marriage by Force? Contestation over Coercion and Consent in Africa (Ohio 2016) with Annie Bunting and Richard L. Roberts. He has served as an expert witness for over three hundred petitions by West African migrants in the U.S., Canada, the U.K, the Netherlands, Israel, and other countries. http://www.rit.edu/cla/socanthro/conable-chair
Events hosted and sponsored by the Refugee Studies Centre and the African Studies Centre.
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