[Commlist] CFP Agency, Community, Kinship - Representations of Migration Beyond Victimhood

---------
AGENCY, COMMUNITY, KINSHIP –
REPRESENTATIONS OF MIGRATION BEYOND VICTIMHOOD

Interdisciplinary Online Symposium, February 23–24, 2022
University of Wuppertal, Germany

Following the work of Michaela Maroufof and Hara Kouki (2017, 78), 
“[m]igration must be understood as a complex social process that is also 
shaped by the agency of the migrants.” Agency, however, is often 
neglected in seemingly benevolent discourses that portray migrants 
primarily as passive and helpless victims. Similarly, researchers often 
tend to disregard the various “tactics” (cf. de Certeau 1984) that 
migrants use to navigate and even modify spaces of sovereignty. While it 
is crucial to expose the ways in which biopolitics and necropolitics 
frame migrant lives as disposable and thus shape the everyday 
experiences of migrants around the globe, it is equally important to 
highlight how migrants assert their agency and thereby challenge the 
dehumanizing tendencies of hegemonic culture. Engin Isin (2018, 2021), 
for example, has identified what he calls “transversal movements” as 
subversive moments that migrants create to disrupt exercises of 
sovereignty and biopower. Drawing on the works of Ludek Stavinoha, Koen 
Leurs, and Martina Tazzioli, he argues that it is primarily in the 
digital sphere that migrants act as (digital) political subjects by 
performing alternative versions of citizenship outside of traditional 
borders of the nation state.
It is, however, not only through these digital practices that migrants 
assert their agency. At the heart of many of these efforts lie kinship 
formations that can not only be advanced and mediated through different 
technologies but are frequently established on a personal level and 
through storytelling and other cultural practices as well. As Francesca 
Decimo and Alessandra Gribaldo (2017, 9) maintain, “the politics of 
kinship represents a crucial dimension in shaping identities and a 
powerful cultural repertoire that intersects with national borders and 
citizenship requirements.” As such, kinship is inextricably linked to 
notions of belonging and nonbelonging, familiarity and difference, power 
and oppression – concepts which continue to inform discourses on 
migration, citizenship, and (national) identity. While it is partly 
based on a set of normative rules, we argue that kinship can be more 
productively understood as a constantly shifting network of relations, a 
transformative practice, and a powerful tool that migrants can use to 
assert their agency.
During this interdisciplinary symposium, we want to examine the 
interplay between agency and kinship in (self-)representations of 
migrants in both fictional and factual narratives. By discussing migrant 
identity discourses in different cultural and medial contexts, we seek 
to explore the ways in which these texts negotiate and challenge the 
unequal distribution of mobility, resources, and vulnerability that 
preconfigures many migrant lives. In particular, we want to discuss 
narrative and representational strategies that migrants employ as well 
as technologies that they draw upon to lay powerful claims on space and 
citizenship.

Possible topics for papers may include but are not limited to:
	individual and/or/versus collective assertions of migrant agency
	artistic, literary, and cinematic representations of migrant agency, 
community, and kinship 	technology’s role in furthering or preventing 
migrant agency and kinship; social media, the Internet, smartphones
	activism
	space, geography, and mobility; transnational communities and 
connectivities
	necropolitics and biopolitics as well as their subversion through acts 
of agency and kinship formation
	politics, governmental agencies, and NGOs, and their influence on 
migrant agency and kinship
	technological changes to borders, increasing militarization and 
privatization of border regimes, etc.
	representations of migrant families and other forms of kinship among 
migrants
	the legacies of colonialism versus postcolonial and decolonial 
perspectives
	migration and kinship and/in the Anthropocene; climate dispossession, 
climate refugees, ecocritical perspectives
	silences and absences; questions of accessibility 	empirical research 
and lived experiences
	epistemic perspectives; knowledge production through technology and 
through kinship
	citizenship and (non)belonging, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion 
and their subversion
	asserting agency and creating familial bonds in and through life writing
	legal perspectives (migration law)
	room for agency within the legal sphere
	Covid-19 and other medical crises and their impact on migrant agency 
and kinship
	gender, race, class, (dis)ability, sexuality, poverty, etc. as 
different perspectives on migration, agency, and kinship

If you are interested in presenting a paper (20 mins) at this symposium, 
please send an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 100 
words) to (espinoza /at/ uni-wuppertal.de), (gebauer /at/ uni-wuppertal.de), and 
(wewior /at/ uni-wuppertal.de).
The deadline for proposals is DECEMBER 12, 2021. Feedback can be 
expected within two weeks.

While we kindly ask participants to present their findings in English, 
we are interested in presentations that focus on representations of 
migration, agency, and kinship outside of the English-speaking world as 
well. We particularly encourage submissions from researchers from 
migrant communities, from underrepresented groups or regions, from the 
Global South, from non-tenured researchers, researchers early in their 
research career, independent scholars or scholars returning from career 
breaks.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic but also to allow people with less funding 
opportunities to participate, this symposium will be held online. We aim 
for an accessible, diverse, and family friendly conference. Please don’t 
hesitate to contact us anytime if you have any questions.

Organized by: Lea Espinoza Garrido, Carolin Gebauer, Julia Wewior
Narrative Research Working Group, Center for Narrative Research, 
University of Wuppertal

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------