The latest event in the series, “We Are All Refugees”: Informal Settlements and Camps as Converging Spaces of Global Displacements, will take place on Wednesday March 17, 2021.
The speaker at this event will be Professor Faranak Miraftab from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. At this online event, Professor Miraftab will give a presentation that draws on her co-authored paper published with similar title, to contribute to the relational theorization of slums and camps as an expanding and overlapping reality in the era of intensified global displacements. By relationally reflecting on realities of those living in slums and in camps, the paper bring to light the comparable spatial practices and governance of the so-called citizens and the so-called stateless. She and her co-authors organize this analytical conversation around three themes: experiential to highlight the precarious relationship of the two groups to citizenship and place, what we call a state of “citizenship in wait” and “in-situ displacement”; institutional to highlight the humanitarian matrices of care that provide governmental structures in both contexts; and micropolitical, to characterize dwellers’ contestations with state and humanitarian governance that constitute the processes of life-making in informal settlements, much as in the camps. Conceptually the paper lends a forceful voice to the mounting critiques of the state-centered canon in planning theories and the needed Southern turn in planning theorization. Politically, “we are all refugees” lends a hand to the efforts of activists working to overcome exclusions and erasures endemic to the politics of citizenship, that pit refugees against the poor, and to gesture toward forging solidarities for a humane urbanism.
The Seminar Series on Forced Migration is part of Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (CRG); and is hosted at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna.
You can register for the event on the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna website.
