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________________________________________ From: Jamie Hakim Sent: 02 April 2014 10:31 To: _School of Law & Social Sciences Staff Subject: Affect, Borders and Bordering *Apologies for cross-posting* Dear all, CMRB is delighted to announce that the Affect, Borders and Bordering seminar that was cancelled due to the academic strike in February, will now be taking place on Monday 28th April, 4-6pm. It will be held in EB.G.18, Docklands Campus, University of East London, E16 2RD, nearest tube: Cyprus DLR (http://www.uel.ac.uk/campuses/docklands/). The event is free but spaces are limited so please reserve a place by following this link http://affectbordersandbordering.eventbrite.co.uk Details of the papers to be presented can be found below. Best, Jamie Affect, Borders and Bordering 4-6pm, Monday 28th April 2014 Feeling the Paradox: Experiences of refugees and social workers living the asylum cycle Virginia Signorini (International University Institute for European Studies) 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. Polygonal Hope: Migrant mothers in Higher Education Ron Cambridge (London Metropolitan University) 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.