*** Apologies for any cross-postings ***
*extension of CfP deadline March 31, 2017*
*Call for Papers*
*Contested Borderscapes*
*Transnational Geographies vis-à-vis Fortress Europe*
September 28 – October 1, 2017
International Conference
Mytilene, Lesvos (Greece)
Urban Geography and Planning Laboratory,
“Invisible Cities” research team & Population Movements Laboratory
Department of Geography, University of the Aegean
*http://www.contested-borderscapes.net
<http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/>*
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a pdf
<http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/CfP-Contested-Borderscapes_no2.pdf>
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*Introduction*
*European member states are signatories to the Geneva Convention Related to
the Status of Refugees.*
*Human rights and dignity are respected in detention centres across Europe.*
*An electrified fence was built to protect the nation-state from illegal
intruders.*
*Traffickers are responsible for deaths by drowning in the Aegean and
Mediterranean seas.*
*Deportations are voluntary returns.*
*Turkey is a safe country.*
*War is peace.*
*Freedom is slavery.*
*Ignorance is strength.*
In 2016, Oxford English Dictionary declared “post-truth” the word of the
year. In this Orwellian moment, the movement of refugees, asylum seekers,
and migrants across the increasingly militarised borders of Europe have
instigated a socio-spatial debate about the limits of human rights,
national sovereignties, continental values, precipitating and contributing
to the ongoing condition of European crises. Although in the era of
globalisation borders constitute porous passages for capital and
commodities, at the same time they have hardened and ossified as “new
enclosures” seeking to immobilise migrant and refugee populations. Fortress
Europe emerges as a complex of new state control mechanisms, freshly
erected border fences, newly built detention centres and improvised refugee
camps; together, these technologies of migration management aim at the
criminalisation, classification, stigmatisation, and biopolitical control
of moving populations, fomented by xenophobic politics, and managed by
humanitarian subcontractors. In this hostile climate, people on the move
contest European border regimes, peripheries, and cityscapes by claiming
spatial justice and political visibility while creating a nexus of emerging
common spaces. They are joined by activists defending their right to
movement, who are engaged in efforts to “welcome refugees” into a shrinking
and contested public sphere, into alternative and self-organised social
spaces, responding to the humanitarian crises wrought by militarism,
violence, and structural adjustment with solidarity, stemming from a larger
vision of sharing in each other’s struggles for survival and social
transformation.
The island of Lesvos is a space of multiple histories of refugee passage,
now reinvented as a “hot spot” in the contemporary European regime of
migration management, but also reimagined by people who live there as a
space of social solidarity with migrant struggles. It thus constitutes one
epicentre, or “contested borderscape” of Fortress Europe, and a place where
we might learn from local struggles and movements against its murderous
politics. If, over the past year, the shores and seaways of Lesvos
(“Lesbos”) gained international visibility as the backdrop to untold human
suffering, loss, and survival, the purpose of gathering here is not to
consume it as a spectacle; instead, we seek to learn from how people here
have responded to, and organised in the urgency of what has became
mediatised as “the refugee crisis.” The main aim of this international
conference is to create a space of critical reflection in which academics,
artists, and activists from different disciplines, backgrounds, and
locations, can strategise, organise, and analyse the social landscapes of
border-spaces such as this, and their reverberations for anti-border
politics elsewhere.
We welcome proposals for various kinds of interventions, including, but not
limited to: presentations of formal academic papers falling under one of
the following five themes; brief provocations leading to open discussions;
performance lectures; installations; exhibitions or screenings of visual
work (e.g., film, photography, etc.); workshops (sharing practical
knowledge, working through a particular idea or problem, teaching a
methodology, approach, or framework). We wish to emphasise multidirectional
discussion and open debate of contested—rather than “settled”—issues, as
opposed to unidirectional knowledge transmission by institutionally
acknowledged academic experts. As such, the conference will open with a
plenary of local activists, and will culminate in a general assembly of all
participants, mapping possibilities for future collaboration and exchange
across and beyond Fortress Europe.
*Topics*
*Track 1: The notion of the border*
- Borderlands, borderscapes, borderlines, border regimes
- Borders and nomadism, diaspora, travel, heterotopias, and otherness
- In-between spaces, hybrid spaces, and threshold spaces vis-à-vis
border fortification, militarisation, enclaves, ghettos, walling urbanism,
state territories
- Bridging political, social, national, gender, religion and identity
borders, boundaries and communities
- No borders, open borders, and border-crossing struggles, movements,
and activism
*Track 2: Migrants’ commoning practices*
- Autonomy of migration and transnationalism
- Mobile common space; strategies and practices for survival, struggle,
solidarity, networking, communication, mutual aid of the moving populations.
- Collective and sharing practices in migrants’ informal settlements and
camps
- Social solidarity, connections between the social struggles of the
locals and the migrants; social philanthropy, humanitarianism, volunteering
and NGO’s industry
- Migrants’ social centres, squatted buildings, and self-organised
housing projects
*Track 3: New intersectional enclosures*
- New enclosure policies, forced displacement, dispossession and
grabbing of the means of production and reproduction, permanence of
so-called primitive accumulation
- Class aspects of immigration, cheap workforce, surplus reserved army
of unemployment
- Emergence of nationalistic-racist-fascist rhetoric and practice, (for
instance, racist locals’ committees, the role of church and media)
- Gendered aspects of immigration (women, lgbtq+, sexism, gendered
violence, pregnancy)
- Age aspects of immigration (children and elderly people)
- Disability and immigration
- Cultural re-appropriation of moving populations
- Slavery, trafficking, human organs’ trafficking
*Track 4: State and Hyperstate migrant policies*
- Fortress Europe, detention centers, hot spots, relocation policies,
new border fences
- Law geographies, divisions between refugees and immigrants,
criminalization and illegalization of border crossing, the right to
citizenship and asylum
- Fear policies, xenophobia and biopolitics
- Health geographies, biosecurity and border controls
- Neocolonialism, geopolitics and war
*Track 5: Representations and communication*
- Cultural representations of the Other
- Landscape and representations of the Other
- Newcomers – new ideas – new cultural relations
- Art and multicultural representations
- Newcomers and e-books, e-sharing, horizontal e-actions
- Other history, other museum, oral history of newcomers
*Submission Procedure*
We welcome proposals for various kinds of interventions, including, but not
limited to: presentations of formal academic papers; brief provocations
leading to open discussions; performance lectures; installations;
exhibitions or screenings of visual work (e.g., film, photography, etc.);
workshops (sharing practical knowledge, working through a particular idea
or problem, teaching a methodology, approach, or framework).
Interested contributors are invited to submit by 1 March 2017 an abstract
of maximum 500 words. Abstracts should include: title, keywords, track
name, name of the author(s), name of the presenter, affiliation and full
contact details (please fill the submission form, link
<http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/submit-your-abstract/>). Authors
will be notified by March 20, 2017, about the status of their proposals.
There are no fees but we do not have funds to cover travel expenses. The
organisers expect an edited volume to result from the gathering. Questions
can be directed to [log in to unmask]
*Important Dates*
Abstracts Submission Deadline: March 31, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: April 20, 2017
Conference: Mytilene, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean,
September 28 – October 1, 2017
*Inquiries*
Inquiries may be directed to: [log in to unmask]
http://www.contested-borderscapes.net
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