WHAT DOES IT MEAN “TO DECOLONIZE?”

The Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course in collaboration with Critical Border Studies invite you to the public event:
The struggle of decolonization once primarily located outside of Europe, today has moved within its borders. What the media continue to call “refugee crisis”, “environmental crisis”, “economic crisis” are, in reality, the incapacity of Europe to come to terms to the condition of five hundred years of colonialism.

This public event is divided in three parts: a public seminar that introduces decolonial options and their relevance in the European context, followed by a public lecture by the renown philosopher Walter D. Mignolo who has been in last 40 years researching and teaching the historical foundation of the modern/colonial world system and imaginary and to conclude with an open discussion on decolonial artistic practices by using as a starting point, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti´s latest book Permanent Temporariness, a collection of research projects developed in over a decade of work within the artistic collective DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency).

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Two Lectures by Professor Ranabir Samaddar

Photo: Jan Boeve / ECF

Upcoming Lectures By Professor Ranabir Samaddar

RETURNING TO THE HISTORIES OF IMMIGRATION OF THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Date: 6 March 2019.  3.15 PM – 5.00 PM
Venue: Uppsala University, Engelska Parken, Room 2-0076.
(Co-organized by Uppsala Religion and Society Research Centre)

THE POSTCOLONIAL AGE OF MIGRATION

Date: 7 March 2019.  2.00 PM – 4.00 PM
Venue: Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Decolonizing Architecture studio (second floor)
(Co-organized by Royal Institute of Art)

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The Design Politics of the Passport: A Conversation between Mahmoud Keshavarz and Stefan Jonsson

Date: Thursday 7 March 2019
Time: 5.30 pm
Place: The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, The Project Room
Address: Maria skolgata 83, Stockholm, Sweden
Language: English 

The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent is a recently published book by design scholar Mahmoud Keshavarz. It’s an innovative study of the passport and its associated social, political and material practices as a means of uncovering the workings of ‘design politics’. It traces the histories, technologies, power relations and contestations around this small but powerful artefact to establish a framework for understanding how design is always enmeshed in the political, and how politics can be understood in terms of material objects.

Combining design studies with critical border studies, alongside ethnographic work among undocumented migrants, border transgressors and passport forgers, this book shows how a world made and designed as open and hospitable to some is strictly enclosed, confined and demarcated for many others – and how those affected by such injustices dissent from the immobilities imposed on them through the same capacity of design and artifice.

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Seeing: The Problem. A Lecture by Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Date: 23 October 2018. 15.00-17.00

Venue: Ihresalen, Uppsala University, Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3

“What if photographs depict what should not have been?” –Jacqueline Goldsby

I have been inconsistent in my relationship with and treatment of moving and still photographic images that depict what should not have been. In this lecture I will first briefly describe two projects in which visual documentation of premature violent death played a central role in the effort to organize evidence for political persuasion. Then, after showing the fragility of the projects’ underlying assumptions, I will explore social features and uses that shaped and shadowed the democratization of photographic image-making. Finally I will offer the outlines of a counter-narrative to highlight how we might usefully consider the co-constitutive interdependencies of consciousness, historical geography, and the machine, in the process of materializing objects that inspire subjects in struggle.

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Open Call: “Art & Migration. Re-Making the World: Human Mobility, Border Violence, and Security Markets”

Tintin Wulia, “Fallen”, 2011. Single-channel video. Still image courtesy of the artist.

PARSE research trajectory on Art & Migration based at the University of Gothenburg calls for contributions that inquire into the embodied, affective, performative, material, visual, and spatial politics of cross-border human mobilities, through arts/crafts/design as well as other disciplines and practices. It concerns all the actors involved in these mobilities: the remarkable proliferation over recent years of heterogeneous human migration formations, including labour migrants and people seeking asylum, the border enforcement infrastructures that arise in response to these mobilities, as well as how these infrastructures incorporate market-based/migration industry actors.

We are interested in works that seek to apprehend or interrogate these complex alliances, antagonisms, and complicities, analysing or interpreting conditions where (nation-)states’ official infrastructures for border control coexist with migration industry infrastructures for border-crossing and market-based enterprises for border enforcement. These include border control through proliferating physical barricades, militarised policing, multilateral border cooperation, detention camps, deportation dragnets, and new strategies of surveillance; both formal and informal migration industry infrastructures (e.g. the outsourcing of migration visa processing, labour migrant recruitment agencies, remittance services, the rise of transit spaces along migration corridors, forged passport markets, migrant smuggling, amongst others); and private security contractors for offshore detention centres. Continue reading Open Call: “Art & Migration. Re-Making the World: Human Mobility, Border Violence, and Security Markets”

Seminar: Snapshots of the Border Walls

Date: 17 September 2018. 15.00-17.00
Venue: Spelbomskan. Aula Magna, Stockholm University

With Minimal Force
Adania Shibli (Writer/Birzeit University)

In light of the political, economic, spatial, and social realms in Palestine/Israel, many art works that were created over the last two decade, had been shaped by colonial and power techniques implemented by the Israeli authorities and military. Such techniques are in particular targeting the movement of Palestinians, and introduced either as daily routine or collective punishment. This seminar will bring discuss examples from the field of art, and how visual art works and even literary texts do interact with such techniques and subvert the very relations they generate by redefining individuals’ positions.

Privilege, Space and Art at the US-Mexico Border
Markus Heide (Uppsala University)

I will introduce sites at the US-Mexico borderline that provide space for the performance of activities of social privilege, such as tourism, international trade, sports, and the arts. These places, in their distinct ways, create an atmosphere of being removed from the immediate perils and evils of the borderlands: illegal trade and undocumented immigration. At the same time the three places are shaped by the militarization of the U.S.’ Southern border since the 1990s and the post-9/11 security regime: The closed and guarded fence and border patrol agents are visible and mark the places as part of the border blockade. Although the three distinct places contribute to cross-border contacts and exchange, they, as well as their use by border people and visitors, contribute to bordering practices and to normalizing the militarized border. How are forms of mobility constructed in the borderlands? What kind of mobilities are welcome by the border regimes? What kind of hierarchies of mobility do the controlled borderlands create?

Symposium: Seeing Like a Smuggler


In a world with an increasing asymmetrical access to freedom of movement in particular and to unequal access to labour, health care and education in general, those who find themselves in vulnerable conditions, rely on irregular services of accessing these rights. Whether for those migrants and refugees whose possibilities to claim asylum and residence have been drastically shrunk since early 1990s, or for border porters who carry heavy package of goods on their back across borders to earn an income, smuggling has been a social, political and economic endeavour that grows alongside the state and its border politics. Continue reading Symposium: Seeing Like a Smuggler

Managing Animal Movements And Quarantine across The Mediterranean: Outline of a Parallel Border Regime

 Professor Sarah Green (University of Helsinki)

People have designed procedures and techniques to control the movement of living animals and, as importantly, to control the movement and spread of animal diseases, across space for centuries. Yet, while the borders that manage and attempt to control the movement of people have received enormous attention from researchers, including anthropologists, the parallel system that manages the movement of animals appears to be virtually invisible – except when the French President wants to send a horse to the Chinese President; or, occasionally, when animal activists get headlines in their ongoing attempts to prevent the long-distance transportation of livestock; or, more often, when an infectious disease breaks out (foot and mouth, bird influenza, swine flu, BSE, etc). Even when these stories appear in the media, little is said about the border regimes that are supposed to regulate the movement of live animals and attempted control over the spread of their diseases. Continue reading Managing Animal Movements And Quarantine across The Mediterranean: Outline of a Parallel Border Regime

Border Methodologies – Panel Session at the 2nd ABS World Conference

10-14 July 2018, Vienna & Budapest

There is an increased interdisciplinary interest in the topic of borders and borderlands. Correspondingly, the field of border studies was growing quite fast in the last years. Despite the increasing number of case studies on different borders across the world and the deepening of theoretical and conceptual thoughts on borders and bordering, there is a significant lack of systematic and comparative reflections on the methodological foundations and consequences of border studies. In our understanding, methodologies link theoretical and empirical accounts as they gather the relationship of epistemological perspectives, choice of research methods and reflections on their scope, reflections on the research process and the role of the researchers, assumptions about the heuristic use of theories, reflections on types of data and their explanatory power etc. Continue reading Border Methodologies – Panel Session at the 2nd ABS World Conference