THIRD CRITICAL STUDIES CONFERENCE
“Empires, States & Migration”
(10-12 September 2009)
Name of the Session VI: Migration and Representation
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Abstract
Our hypothesis is that French and Spanish press stick to fixed and “cliché” representations of migrants, both far from “extreme racist positions” and from “new attitudes towards migrants” in the two societies. Another challenge will be to observe whether printed media start echoing some fears such as “migrants take our work”, meanwhile unemployment is at rise in both countries. Nevertheless, W’ll have to consider the difference between France, a land of ancient immigration and Spain, a country of recent immigration (with a former tradition of emigration).
The research will focus on a survey of some newspapers of the French and Spanish general press in 2008 (from September up to December). W’ll try and analyse the words and representations used to qualify migrants. W’ll try and check if there is a specific treatment assigned to European migrants and non European migrants. Finally, w’ll try and investigate to what extent the European Year of Interculturel Dialogue (2008) had any consequences on the press’s content in these two countries.
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Anne-Marie Autissier is a Lecturer at European Studies Institute, Paris 8 University, in Sociology of Culture and Cultural European Policies. Since 1986, she has been a consultant for various European organizations. She is President of Culture Europe International, a emagazine and press review dedicated to Cultural policies and practices in Europe, printed in French and English and released throughout Europe. Most recent publications : “ Cultural networking in Europe ”, (2003) in ECA Report: Copenhagen; L’Europe de la culture, Histoire(s) et enjeux, 2005, Actes-Sud: Arles; (ed.) The Europe of Festivals, Crossing approaches from Edinburgh to Zagreb, (2008), Culture Europe International/Les Editions de l’Attribut: Toulouse;(ed.) Intercultural dialogue(s) in Europe, Intersecting outlooks on European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, (2008) Culture Europe International: Paris.
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Abstract
Though migration is a fact of all ages, it has recently come to the fore in public discourse and has in effect “migrated” massively into the literature of political philosophy and the canons of contemporary artistic production. This is largely due to the iniquitous treatment of migrants before the gates of Europe, a continent from which people once emigrated en masse but now unable to deal with a net influx of migrants – a fact which has understandably attracted the attention of activists, theorists and artists. But it is also a sign of the emergence of a competing paradigm for understanding the effects of migration and the agency of the migrant. Instead of the dominant “residentialist” understanding which construed migration as a deviation from the norm of settled life, the phenomenon has come to be seen as a dynamic feature of social life; rather than typecasting migrants as passive victims, “in a dream dreamt by another” as writer John Berger once said, it has become more interesting to consider how and with what resources they plot their journeys. If representations of migration still draw upon alienating images, migrants are no longer portrayed as torn from their homelands, but as lost in an what might be described as an open labyrinth – a paradoxical figure, to be sure, but one which merges the migrant’s predicament somehow universal. It may even make the migrant very model of an agent of change in the name of a global humanity. Drawing upon examples of art and other symbolic configurations (videos of Ursula Biemann, Angela Melitopoulos…), we will examine the contours of this new paradigm while considering how such issues as “migration” have migrated into aesthetic and ethical discourse.
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Stephen Wright is a Paris-based writer, curator and independent researcher. Since 2004, he has curated a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship. He has written extensively on the use-value of art as an extradisciplinary practice, particularly in contexts of collaborative undertakings outside the performative framework of the artworld, where art is often a mode of pursuing political philosophy by other means. A former programme director at the Collège international de philosophie (2000-2007), he is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text (London). A number of his text may be found on the collective blog n.e.w.s (http://northeastwestsouth.net/)
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Abstract
Narratives of Muslim women’s victimization by religion— ostensibly rooted in inherently regressive, anti-modern and immutable “Islamic” laws—have been standard fixtures in mass media, policy circles and numerous academic tracts for some time now. This paper offers one reading of how these narratives are produced and sustained. Located within the new global economy of fear, into which liberal feminism has been explicitly enlisted the paper explores the violence incurred in translating notions of gender justice across a number of borders, all suffused with the politics of imperialism. These translations and borders include linguistic borders and the challenge of reproducing the language of rights into the idiom of morality and honor; the secular-religious divide and so on. The paper assumes that these borders are not part of objective reality but produced through language; they are idiomatic realities across which translation becomes necessary; translation creates difference as well as eases communication.
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Dina Siddiqi is a cultural anthropologist and research consultant who divides her time between the United States and Bangladesh. Her research interests cover a broad spectrum: Islam and transnational feminist politics; gender justice and non-state dispute resolution systems; the cultural politics of nationalism; sexuality and rights discourse; and women in the garment industry. Her recent publications include “Do Bangladeshi Sweatshop Workers Really Need Saving? Transnational Feminism in a post-Sweatshop Era” in Feminist Review, 2009 and “In the Name of Islam? Gender, Politics and Women’s Rights in Bangladesh” in Harvard Asia Quarterly, 2006. Dr. Siddiqi has taught at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research and University of Pennsylvania, as well as at Dhaka and Jahangirnagar University. She has worked for leading human rights organizations in Bangladesh including Ain o Salish Kendra. She is part of the Core Advisory Group of the South Asian Network of Gender Activists and Trainers (SANGAT) and a member of the international network, the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR).