JOSEFINA ECHAVARRÍA ALVAREZ / SPEAKER / COLOMBIA
Migrants as Threats: How Security Discourses Define Self and Other
Talk, 2010, written for THE SHELTER PROJECT
The question of a sovereign “self”—both individually and collectively, is the particular notion of an identity that ought to reveal certainty about who and where “we” are. Stories about our past, present, and future are amalgamated through a stable home. Sovereign selves call for secure narratives and secure spaces in the face of violent practices that erase counter-narratives about who we are, sanction unwanted forms of diversity, and expel undesirable bodies. It has become commonplace to criticize how such a fairy-tale of sameness and home can only be manufactured through exclusion. Yet, despite these insights in academic discussions, there is an ever-increasing tendency in migration policies and political discourses to treat immigrants as threats. Migration has become a matter of security. Within this framework, this talk focuses on the problematization of securing migration by scrutinizing the violent attempts to create a safe home for “us” and deny shelter to “them.” The practices of resistance to such securitization are countless, henceforth, to conclude, I highlight some strategies that might push forward alternative identities of “self” and “others,” how they implicate each other and so how our homes—our places of shelter—can be imagined otherwise.
Josefina Echavarría Alvarez is a Colombian researcher, lecturer at the MA Program in Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck and at the MA Program in Latin American Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research interests focus on issues of identity, security, and peace. >>site
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MONIKA MOKRE / SPEAKER / VIENNA, AUSTRIA
About the Right to Feel at Home
Talk, 2010, written for THE SHELTER PROJECT
An explorarion of the contradictory claims regarding “feeling at home,” Dr. Mokre’s talk is drawn from the tension between (national) citizenship and (voluntary as well as enforced) mobility. This tension is represented in various discourses such as the extreme right agenda on national identity and the necessity to protect this identity against influences of immigrants; the neo-liberal discourse on the right, if not the duty, to mobility; discourses on asylum seekers and non-European immigrants based on human rights; and the discourses framing these groups as potential threat to (national, sub-national or supra-national) communities. Starting with-structuralist thought, Dr. Mokre examines the necessary incompleteness of every identity and the equally powerful desire for completeness. Arguing that the emotionality of such discourses arises from the difficulty of accepting the precariousness of one’s identity, she will examine the current search for culprits and the claim for their elimination. She will furthermore discuss how conflicting claims and rights for “feeling at home” can be negotiated in a democratic way.
Monika Mokre is a political scientist, working at the Institute for Cultural Studies and History of Theatre of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is board member of FOKUS, the Austrian Association for Cultural Economics and Policy Studies, and chairwomen of eipcp, the European institute for progressive cultural policies. Her research fields include European democracy, public sphere, and identity as well as cultural politics. >>site view extended summary
WOLFGANG SÜTZL / SPEAKER / VIENNA, AUSTRIA
Untranslating Shelter
Talk, 2010, written for THE SHELTER PROJECT
“Shelter” is a hard term to translate. The recent entry of translation theory into cultural and political theory, and the fact that shelter occupies, like few other concepts, precisely the boundary between culture and politics, marks my departure point for this talk. In it, I attempt to develop an understanding of the political and cultural dimensions of the concept and their mutual conditioning, and the meaning of activism against this background. I will trace the impact that theories of cultural translation have made on thinking about emancipation in a time of vanishing universality. Following Boris Buden, Gayatri Spavak, Chantal Mouffe and others I then engages in a critique of the culturalization of politics and apply that critique to the concept of “shelter.” What are the meanings of “shelter” beyond a dichotomy of cultural readings such as “home” and dark biopolitical dispositives such as the “bunker”? What kind of activism, what kind of media are required to move beyond a privatization of living spaces on the one hand, and a proliferation of prisons, camps, and “black spots” on the other? Can “shelter” be untranslated?
Wolfgang Sützl is a media theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has taught at various universities in Austria and internationally. He is currently conducting research on activist media at the University of Innsbruck. Recent publications include Creating Insecurity (ed. with Geoff Cox) and Gewalt und Präzision (Violence and precision, ed. with Doris Wallnöfer). >>site
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