[-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

Wed Feb 17 05:23:34 AEDT 2016

What do you guys think of Ai Weiwei's photo reenacting in his own body the
death of the three-year old Syrian girl washed on the Anatolian shore?

Ciao,
Murat

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Ian Paul <ianalanpaul at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> While it's perhaps not so productive for us to say that borders and
> migrations are simply symptomatic of larger systems/histories, it's also
> insufficient to treat borders and migrations as discrete or autonomous
> objects of study. What is a border, after all, if not a particular way of
> articulating a relationship between territories, between bodies, between
> economies, etc.? This relationality, and all of the complexity it entails,
> should be what we're after.
>
> Ricardo cited "Escape Routes" in an earlier thread, and I think that text
> in particular could be useful for us in the sense that the authors approach
> borders and migrations in this multitudinous fashion: as material realities
> in the present that are also structured by epistemological, geological,
> political, ethical, and economic bordering(s) that seamlessly function
> alongside/within/through the border practices of nation states.
>
> I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders and
> migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while also
> understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more
> expansive processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we
> think of borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent
> and object? Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able
> to think of borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling
> certain forms of life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able
> to think of migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even
> poetry, while also being able to think of them as also at times being
> driven by necessity and survival. I want to be thinking on these
> topologies: freedom *and* survival, repression *and* production.
>
> Cheers,
>       ~i
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:27 AM, Babak Fakhamzadeh <
> babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hi Johannes,
>>
>> I like your musings, but you're putting up quite a list of potential
>> discussion points. :)
>>
>> Should we discuss the wars? Perhaps. But, what, then is in need of
>> discussion? That is, to what extent is the current Syrian/Iraqi
>> conflict open to interpretation? I doubt few of us on this list are
>> fooled by western/American propaganda in relation to the sources of
>> the conflict and most of us probably have a decent understanding of
>> the actual players in the conflict. But, also, we're focussing on
>> migration and refugees, not on the war, no?
>> --
>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com |
>> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>>
>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> > Johannes I was deliberately in the use of the words callosity because
>> my question is: do we really change a thing in the lives of the refugees or
>> the migrants discussing the concept but not the roots? As Ian wrote we
>> should maybe discuss the war itself or the inequalities. A discussion hands
>> on is maybe the thing related in the first weeks travel to Calais and teach
>> refugees English or computer skills or make theatre or dance with them
>> write down their stories record their flight.
>> > Ana
>> >
>> > Skickat från min iPhone
>> >
>> >> 15 feb 2016 kl. 20:56 skrev Johannes Birringer <
>> Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>:
>> >>
>> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> >> Dear all,
>> >>
>> >> Header:  it actually would make sense to track back to opening
>> statement for this month. For me, it raised many questions, for example
>> what the 'networked existence' of a refugee or migrant or asylum seeker is
>> meant to denote, in the question/ proposition? And Babak, Huub, Ricardo -
>> do you not eloquently evoke a crisis of the from, not the to, the issue of
>> why people are fleeing?   Have we discussed the wars?
>> >>
>> >> Well, Ana, what would hands on discussion be for you?
>> >>
>> >> I really appreciated all posts, and I found Christina's painting very
>> powerful, maybe because I saw it on the  same day that someone,
>> accidentally (and yes I despise superbowls and police Kettling/enclosures,
>> and huge movies that strive  to awe us, like The Revenant), sent me a
>> mapping of the US in the 18th and 19th centuries of annexation and theft of
>> millions of acres of native American lands, the map was created by Claudio
>> Saunt, more about that mapping tomorrow. (and i hate the mumbling of native
>> american languages in The Revenant).
>> >> Today, I marvel at what Ana means by the callosity of poetry, is it
>> callous or cynical to draw, to make dance, to write, to sing? and what
>> exactly is political activism in the era of post democracy? What are border
>> tools and apps that won't be available to the  migrant from Bolivia or
>> Honduras making her way up to Mexico and then Texas? How long do your
>> phones and laptop batteries last for the poetry to kick in? Would she are
>> what you call her and definebher as, would we a voice here from the ones
>> talked about?  And then, writers and researchers, at the limits of language
>> (as Christina and Irina pointed out), artists, scholars and activists -
>> what do we chat about here, then?
>> >>
>> >> Regards
>> >> Johannes Birringer
>> >>
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