Workshop @ University of Oxford School of Geography and the Environment Friday, 9th November 2018
1. Poem: Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
Audio
Refugees are dialectical beings.
Only refugees can forever write the archive.
2. Keynote Address: Behrouz Boochani
WhatsApp Video
Manus Island & Prison Camps: Extraterritorial spaces of Australia.
Pacific Solution
Private companies that run prisons
Broken borders. Remaining borders. Extended borders.
Political hostages
Limited access to the court system of Australia.
Identified by a number (People have forgotten their names).
Ye was right: New Slaves
Torture to send a message: don’t come here (sign documents and be flown back; most don’t want to go for various reasons).
Christmas Island
Mental torture and difference between guilty and innocent prisoner.
Real prison (convicted of illegal entry into a country) is better than this system.
Q&A
– What types of mobilisation?
- A movie, play, video installations, 150 articles in a book (in literary language and journalism language).
- Done his work in a way that researchers can publish/do research.
- Understand this camp and system in a historical and philosophical way.
- Skype credit run out.
– Four Prime Ministers, but nothing happens (limbo); National security and national interests.
– Is UNHCR present? (UNHCR, Red Cross, Amnesty Intl. visit).
– Has criticised all organisations. An industry/Business.
– Systematic censorship.
– Prison conditions for 4 and 1/2 years.
– Small island (Concept: remote, different).
– Master in Political Geography (Read the book and watch the movie).
3. Panel 1: Decolonising Refugee Research
Patricia Daley (Oxford)
– Pan-African Feminist Womanist.
– What are the questions we ask?
– Purity and Exile.
– Master narrative.
– The absence of race in research on refugees (Nicolas Gichenova; race). How racialisation travels and the way it permeates the research that has been done.
– Using terms developed by politicians in an uncritical fashion. Looking at the history of terminologies, and how they emerge. Archival work around concepts.
– Refugee status: the importance of status, and how it is interpreted at the different levels of the state.
– Chakrabara.
– Guerilla Intellectual (being in the university and critiquing it).
– Don’t be afraid to push the boundaries of intellect and theory.
– Everyday forms of conviviality that exist outside the formal refugee industry.
– OAU liberation committee (Apartheid, anti-colonial). This has been pushed aside in favour of more Northern based initiatives such as UNHCR.
Ramona Sanyal (LSE)
– Is Decolonisation the New Black (diluting the radical agendas of decolonising).
– Paula Bannergie (B. S. Chimney)
– Consumer-driven activism (celebrities, the west is a superior centre of knowledge).
– White researchers doing research in non-white settings seems normal, whereas non-white researchers doing research in countries other than their own raised eyebrows.
– My identity is fluid.
– class, gender, and cast privilege vs. white privilege.
– How are we complicit in the colonisation of research.
– Challenge race privilege.
– Positionality needs to go beyond short section in the introduction.
– More of an effort to embrace the contexts and languages in which we work.
– Fictional authors do a good job of weaving positionality into the narrative.
Hashem Abushama (Oxford)
– A Palestinian refugee doing research should probably do an autoethnography. Or not…
– Inclusive exclusion. What?!
– Theory of the flesh (Reclaim the history, politics, etc). The flesh offers an analytical framework.
– State-centered and policy-centred frameworks.
– Palestinians building settlements (thereby perpetuating the status quo).
– The genre of the human.
4. Panel 2: Critical Methodologies in Refugee Research.
Yolanda Weima
– Industrial location theory.
– capitalism
– space is a product of interrelations.
– the global is present.
– white innocence in the black Mediterranean:…
– space is always space-time, it cannot exist without time.
– Julius Nyerere: … critical practice in relation to refugees.
Hanno Brankamp
– Three fields of demarcation: language, presence and time.
– Ethnographic research (8:30).
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
– Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Patricia Daley
– Partners: PEN International, English-Pen
– Project: Stories in Transit, Save The Children Humanitarian Affairs Team.
– encounters between Palestinian refugees and those displaced from Syria.
– participant observation, 500 interviews.
– creative writing ‘as’ research, ‘data collection’ but also as much more, as a way of analysing throughout our journeys. Collaborative writing across the team.
– ‘The Camp is Time’, ‘Writing the Camp’, by Yousif M Qasmiyeh.
– refugeehosts.org/creative-archive
– creative methods as resistance.
– permanent impermanence
– Refugee Imaginaries, book. Rhizoanalysis of refugee camp situations.
5. Panel 3: Humanising Refugee Research in a Turbulent World
Jonathan Darling (Durham University).
– The growth of journalistic accounts of refugees in recent years (The New Odyssey, light in the distance).
– John Snow on The New Odyssey.
– “Humanise” definition: Cambridge and Oxford definition.
– G4S housing refugees.
– The banality of everyday life in refugee research.
– Daniel Trilling
Estella Capri (University College London)
– No avenue to humanisation without seeing research as transformational.
– interdisciplinarity.
– emotional ethnography of institutions (elaborating on a feeling perspective)!
Oliver Bakewell (University of Manchester)
– Sesame Credit Scoring Scheme.
– The politicisation of bureaucracies.
– even when we challenge policy categories, we might come back to them to make our analysis legible to others.
– humanised set of new categories.
– acknowledge the dehumanising inherent in our work.
– Dehumanise differently (elaborate).
– humanising someone is making them legible to westerners.
– anti-blackness scholars (do we want to be human in the western sense?)
– ‘the rush to Europe young Africa on the way to the old continent’
