Carolyn Defrin
“By sea and by land: mapping European and American borderscapes through art”
Wednesday, November 5
Schubertstraße 21/ground floor
Abstract:
This 40 minute presentation will share early research findings from a recent trip along the US/Mexico border visiting museums and community arts initiatives. It will also compare these findings about how art responds to the border with a current project based in Samos, Greece and Tenerife, Spain about how art can shape social-relationships between key border actors.
As part of the lecture, students will be invited to participate in interactive arts methods to explore how creative mapping of temporalities might lead to future imaginations of migration and borders.
Bio:
Carolyn Defrin is a socially engaged artist, researcher and facilitator working at the intersection of art and community development.
Through film, installation, theatre, poetry and music, she collaborates with artists, activists, educators, community leaders and policy makers to express and understand social issues.
Julia Roth
“Becoming Ruthless: Toward a Cultural Reading of Law”
Wednesday, November 12
Schubertstraße 21/ground floor
Abstract:
The critical depiction of legal imaginaries in texts such as Mohameodu Ould Slahi’s the Guantánamo Diary illustrate how legal norms are marked by cultural-historical contexts and biases. Against this backdrop, the talk traces how legal classifications draw on problematic, but unquestioned, sociocultural categories and configurations, and it delineates the role literary and cultural representations play in producing and consolidating, but also in interrogating, such configurations from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. Making reference to the long trajectory of textual/cultural interventions that have challenged hegemonic notions and configurations of legal discourse and the rule of law by those excluded from, oppressed or delegitimized by them, it argues that a focus on Law and Culture helps to de-naturalize the authority of legal categories, assumptions, and hierarchies and to contribute to alternative visions of the future. The talk discusses a number of exemplary literary, testimonial and artistic practices related to rights and delineates the ways in which they contribute to the critical analysis of the different (legal) imaginaries and affective mobilisations (of what feels right). Finally, the talk will zoom in on he current polarized scenario in which retrogressive forces increasingly contest human rights and the rule of law, in which many appropriate the language of freedom of law for their anti-pluralist re-framings. It will thus finally argue for a “ruthless” take on the law: that is, a practical commitment to existing legal norms and tools as a starting point for the fight for equality and defence of emancipatory and pluralist legal framings.
Bio:
Julia Roth is currently teaching American Studies at Bielefeld University, where she is also director of the Center for Interamerican Studies (CIAS) and PI at the DFG Graduate School “Experiencing Gender”. Previously, she was Professor of American Studies with a focus on Gender Studies and Inter-American Studies in Bielefeld and postdoctoral fellow in the research project "The Americas as Space of Entanglements" in Bielefeld and in the interdisciplinary network "desiguALdades.net - Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America" at Freie Universität Berlin. She was well as a lecturer at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Universität Potsdam, and Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico snd La Plata, Argentina. Her research focuses on postcolonial, decolonial and gender approaches, intersectionality and global inequalities, anti-racist feminist knowledge from the Caribbean and the Americas, Hip Hop and social transformation, gender and genre, law and literature and legal imaginaries, gender and citizenship, and right-wing populism and gender. In addition to her academic work, she co-/organizes and -curates cultural and political events.
Fabio Santos
“”Europe” in “Latin America”: Illegalized Mobilities, Deportable Bodies, and Contested Sovereignties in the French-Brazilian Borderland"
Wednesday, November 19
HYBRID
Schubertstraße 21/ground floor
online via Zoom
Abstract:
This talk examines migrant illegality and inequality at the colonial crossroads of Europe and Latin America, focusing on the borderland between the Brazilian state of Amapá and the French overseas department of Guyane. It begins with a terminological and spatial (re)orientation, followed by a historical contextualization that challenges the naturalization of the border and its assumed need for control against illegalized migrants. In the case of the French-Brazilian borderland, unequal mobilities must be understood within the history of colonial conquest, racialization, enslavement, and forced migration that shaped this borderland as part of the Atlantic world. By reconnecting nationally separated and often neglected histories of mobility in the longue durée, multiple exclusions become evident – from exclusion from rights to physical exclusion through deportation. The chapter further argues that recent migration flows, along with measures intended to restrict them, highlight Guyane as a laboratory of legal exceptionalisms that facilitate the illegality, deportability, and deterrence of migrants. Examples of anti-immigration measures in recent years include fast-track asylum processing and deportations, racial profiling, and deliberate shortages of accommodation and financial support for asylum seekers. The pinnacle of this infrastructural facilitation of illegality is the Oyapock River Bridge: inaugurated in 2017, the first bridge linking Brazil and France has ultimately become a one-way street reinforcing unequal mobilities in a borderland that defies the neat geopolitical categories to which many social scientists have grown accustomed.
Bio:
Fabio Santos is a tenure-track assistant professor in Histories of Migration at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen. He interweaves the intimate and local with the global and structural, revealing how people’s everyday lives are shaped by broader entanglements – an approach at the heart of his book Bridging Fluid Borders: Entanglements in the French-Brazilian Borderland (Routledge, 2022). The recurring themes of his teaching and writing – migration, inequality, and colonialism – are explored through ethnographic and historical methods.
Yasemin Besen-Cassino
“Serving up Politics: Effects of Political Polarization on Service Sector Workers in the United States”
Tuesday, December 9
SZ 15.22 - Universitätsstraße 15, Section G, 2nd floor
Abstract:
Saying “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays,” the decisions to mask or not to mask during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, allowing the homeless to stay in stores or calling the police or simply displaying the Pride flag during Pride month have all become points of contention in retail and service sector jobs. A substantial portion of the political polarization in the United States have taken place at coffee chains, fast food stores, supermarkets, and retail establishments. These political divisions have made the already precarious lives of service sector workers more challenging and unsafe. Using data from Bureau of Labor Statistics, original surveys as well as in-depth interviews with service sector workers, I find that service sector workers experience violence and harassment particularly during election years and especially based on four major issues: Pride displays, Black Lives Matter movement, attitudes towards the homeless and masking/social distancing rules. I explore the lived experience of service sector jobs and the daily techniques workers use to navigate political divisions and offer comparisons as well as policy suggestions.
Bio:
Yasemin Besen-Cassino is a Professor of Sociology and University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University. She served as the Editor of Contemporary Sociology, a flagship journal of the American Sociological Association, Book Review Editor of Gender & Society and the Managing Editor of Men & Masculinities. Author of six books, her research focuses on sociology of labor, organizations, work and gender. Her work appeared in many popular venues such as the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Newsweek, CNN, MTV, Fortune, GQ, Daily Mail and Ms. magazine among many others. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, American Association of University Women(AAUW) as well as the W.E. Upjohn Foundation.