CMRB (The Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging)

at the University of East London is pleased to announce as part of its

Borders and Bordering Seminar Series:

Affect, Borders and Bordering

This seminar will take place in

EB.G.18, Docklands Campus, University of East London, E16 2RD, nearest tube: Cyprus DLR

(http://www.uel.ac.uk/campuses/docklands/)

4-6pm, Monday 10^th February 2014

Feeling the Paradox:

Experiences of refugees and social workers living the asylum cycle

Virginia Signorini (International University Institute for European Studies)

Trading in Desire in the Ukrainian-Romanian Borderlands

Dr. Kathryn Cassidy (Northumbria University/UEL)

Unsettled memory from "a godforsaken spit of land": remembering the Italian 'psychiatric revolution' in Gorizia

Dr. Elena Trivelli (Goldsmiths)

Polygonal Hope: Migrant mothers in Higher Education

Ron Cambridge (London Metropolitan University)

The event is free but spaces are limited so please reserve a place by following the below link  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/affect-borders-and-bordering-tickets-10279120125?ref=estw

See www.euborderscapes.eu for more information on the EU Borderscapes project, www.uel.ac.uk/cmrb/borderscapes for details of the UEL Borderscapes team and www.uel.ac.uk/cmrb for information on CMRB

Abstracts and Biographical notes

Virginia Signorini, Feeling the Paradox: Experiences of refugees and social workers living the asylum cycle

The time of asylum is cyclical, frequently based on the creation of paradoxes. When asylum seekers apply for protection, they have to dig into their traumatic past, in order to be allowed to stay and access a new present and have the possibility to turn towards the future. Once refugees are into the asylum system, they can access reception projects, which are expected to activate inclusion policies and practices to support the reconstruction of refugee lives. But when the time of these projects ends, there is often a high risk that refugees will move back to the starting point. This process of deterioration affects both refugees and social workers, feeling the paradoxical “non-sense” inscribed in the fragility and temporariness of those practices of inclusion, whose disappearance can signify marginalized living in the new country of asylum. Therefore, in this particular type of migration, the provisional is in the fluctuating border existing between being refugee and becoming citizen, and in the experiences of who is involved in the attempt to overcome this border. This paper will explore the cyclical nature of the asylum-system in Italy, on the one hand through the permanent sense of uncertainty felt by refugees, and on the other by analysing the sense of unhelpfulness lived by social workers in their everyday professional and personal experience in the asylum system. 

Virginia Signorini finished her M.A. in Public Relations at the University of Udine (I) in 2004. From 2004 till 2010 she worked as a social worker for the “System of Protection for Asylum seekers and Refugees” of Prato (I). In 2006 she attended the Masters Program in “Gender, citizenship and cultural pluralism: processes of exclusion and inclusion for migrants and refugees” at the University of Florence. Since 2011 she has been a Ph.D. student in “Transborder policies for daily life” at the International University Institute for European Studies (http://www.iuies.org/) of Gorizia and Trieste University (I); the focus of her doctoral research is on refugees' access to social rights. Virginia’s major areas of research are migration and refugee studies.

Dr. Kathryn Cassidy, Trading in Desire in the Ukrainian-Romanian Borderlands

This paper will explore the ways in which male cross-border small traders in the Ukrainian-Romanian Borderlands attempt to ‘undo’ their engagement in spaces of desire at Romanian border and customs controls. Desire in this context emerges from the gendered, heteronormative sexualised performance focused on female bodies, in which male traders engage with border and customs officials as they cross the border (Cassidy, 2013). The performance alongside the payment of a cash bribe, seeks to deter full searches of the vehicles and ensure the non-payment of taxes and duties, which is vital to the profitability of the trade. Yet, for many male traders, this performance often sexualises relationships with their female companions and demands expressions of desire with which they do not feel uncomfortable. Away from the border, they then seek to ‘undo’ this desire and sexualisation through contradicting and contrasting discourses, which often employ humour and processes of othering Romanian officials. Whilst the making of desire at the border is public and highly visible, this ‘undoing’ of gendered desire is, thus, ‘dis’placed away from the border itself into private and less visible spaces of cross-border small trade.

Dr. Kathryn Cassidy is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a Senior Research Fellow on the EU Borderscapes project at the University of East London. Grounded in empirical fieldwork in the post-socialist countries of eastern Europe and amongst Romanian migrant workers in London, Kathryn’s research takes a critical, feminist approach to understanding informal economies, everyday, situated bordering, stillness within cross-border mobilities and emotional aspects of labour market precarity and vulnerability. Kathryn has an ESRC-funded PhD from the University of Birmingham, Masters degrees from Birmingham and UCL and completed her undergraduate studies in geography at the University of Nottingham.

Dr. Elena Trivelli, Unsettled memory from "a godforsaken spit of land": remembering the Italian 'psychiatric revolution' in Gorizia.
The notion of intergenerational trauma often refers to clinical understandings of patterns of behaviour within families. In this paper, I present an approach to historical and transgenerational trauma, as circulating in a community across the decades, drawing from the fields of affect studies, memory studies, and human geography. I suggest that past events are unconsciously carried forward in collective memory practices, where the dynamics of transmission and circulation of trauma are sustained by narratives of place. I focus on the city of Gorizia, with a particular reference to its role in the history of Italian psychiatry. Gorizia was the first city where Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) experimented with extra-asylum forms of care from the 1960s, work which paved the way towards the national abolition of psychiatric hospitals in 1978. Despite its prominent role in this ‘psychiatric revolution’, Gorizia does not remember with ease ‘the Basaglia experience’. Memory has been carried forward through periodical practices of forgetting, rewriting and reinterpreting, in what I define as a ‘remembering crisis’. I suggest that the dynamics of this crisis are geographically contingent to the city of Gorizia, located on the border with Slovenia, and to a history of war traumas in the area. I trace a thread between human geography and psychoanalysis, making a case for the role that past events play in definitions and understandings of ‘place’, and how these play a role in the circulation and distribution of trauma in the present.

Dr Elena Trivelli currently works as an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths University and at Oxford Brookes University. She received her Ph.D. in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths in 2013. Her doctoral work explores the history of Italian psychiatry, with a particular focus on the city of Gorizia. Her current research is at the intersection between critical psychiatry, affect theories, the ‘neuroscientific turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, and personal narratives of depression. She received her BA and MA in Performance Studies from Queen Mary, University of London.

Ron Cambridge, Polygonal Hope: Migrant mothers in Higher Education

The paradox between contended objectives of social justice in education policy and actual practice in HE has been highlighted in the past. Research into `Student-Parents’ as ‘non-traditional’ students has taken an instrumental approach with an emphasis on describing experiences. Taken from a broader qualitative analysis this study draws upon the narratives of six undergraduate migrant mothers in HE, by drawing upon affect theory, and in particular, the notion of `Hope’, as an analytical theoretical framework. This study underlines the importance of a reciprocal relationship between material experiences and affective understanding which enables what may seem vulnerable yet strong individuals, to act and progress. This study argues that the central theme attributed to hope in the individual’s experiences is significant in their motivation and achievement both in their migration and education. Here, the complexity of hope is presented in a multifaceted complex praxis which points to the extent to which hope, although polygonal, allows for things to be different from how they are.