Books by sandra ponzanesi
De Gruyter, 2024
In the millennial transition the prefix ‘post’ had come to signify more and more not just
the re... more In the millennial transition the prefix ‘post’ had come to signify more and more not just
the realisation of a ‘coming after’ but also of the impossibility of not seeing the present as still very much working through the wounds of the past. Yet with the appearance of pseudo-concepts such as ‘post-truth’ after an equally imaginary ‘death of History’, the logic of the ‘post’, itself always already under questioning, may appear to have outlived its usefulness. How to make sense of postcolonial theory in Europe in the present? One way might be to renew its significance as world conflicts have entered a new ‘post-imperial phase’ with the return of ideologies of empire in various parts of the world. The essays in this volume address those questions at both a conceptual, theoretical level, and through the analysis of specific case studies. In the Introduction Paulo de Medeiros and Sandra Ponzanesi review the main questions outlined above in relation to the current debates in the Humanities from their respective disciplinary perspectives. The volume is organised in four sections, each containing four chapters. Even though all the chapters present a reflection on Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, some focus more specifically on aspects of the crisis in a global perspective such as humanitarian crisis and the role of mediatization of conflicts, to issues related to human rights, refugees, migrancy, environmental crisis to questions of memory and postmemory as well as the critique of art and utopian thought.
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Doing Digital Migration present a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates... more Doing Digital Migration present a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates, methodological interventions, political discussions and ethical debates around migrant forms of belonging as articulated through digital practices. Digital technologies impact upon everyday migrant lives, while vice versa migrants play a key role in technological developments – be it when negotiating the communicative affordances of platforms and devices, as consumers of particular commercial services such as sending remittances, as platform gig workers or test cases for new advanced surveillance technologies. With its international scope, this anthology invites scholars to pluralize understandings of ‘the migrant’ and ‘the digital’. The anthology is organized in five different sections: Creative Practices; Digital Diasporas and Placemaking; Affect and Belonging; Visuality and digital media and Datafication, Infrastructuring, and Securitization. These sections are dedicated to emerging key topics and debates in digital migration studies, and sections are each introduced by international experts.
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This volume focusses on the role of art, culture and politics in transitions and the struggle for... more This volume focusses on the role of art, culture and politics in transitions and the struggle for social justice. Sometimes these transitions are traumatic and violent processes as in the case of post-apartheid South Africa. In other cases, as in Europe, they involve long-standing histories that are multi-directionally linked to colonialism, holocaust and totalitarianism. The authors explore intersectional issues of transition and social change in conjunction with broader debates on the role of democracy, citizenship and human rights. In doing so, they engage with the work of feminist scholar Rosemarie Buikema.
Routledge, 2023
This edited volume explores the idea of Europe through a focus on its margins. The chapters in th... more This edited volume explores the idea of Europe through a focus on its margins. The chapters in the volume inquire critically into the relations and tensions inherent in divisions between the Global North and the Global South as well as internal regional differentiation within Europe itself. In doing so, the volume stresses the need to consider Europe from critical interdisciplinary perspectives, highlighting historical and contemporary issues of racism and colonialism.
While recent discussions of migration into ‘Fortress Europe’ seem to assume that Europe has clearly demarcated geographic, political and cultural boundaries, this book argues that the reality is more complex. The book explores margins conceptually and positions margins and centres as open to negotiation and contestation and characterized by ambiguity. As such, margins can be contextualized in relation to hierarchies within Europe, with different processes involved in creating boundaries and borders between different kinds of Europes and Europeans. Deploying case studies from different places, such as Iceland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the UK, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Sicily, European colonies in the Caribbean and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors analyse how different geopolitical hierarchies intersect with racialized subject positions of diverse people living in Europe, while also exploring issues of gender, class, sexuality, religion and nationality. Some chapters draw attention to the fortification of Europe’s ‘borderland,’ while others focus on internal hierarchies within Europe, critiquing the meaning of spatial boundaries in an increasingly digitalized Europe. In doing so, the chapters interrogate the hierarchies at play in the processes of being and becoming ‘European’ and the ongoing impacts of race and colonialism.
This timely and thought-provoking collection will be of considerable significance to those in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in Europe.
Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe, 2023
Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of sixteen chapters t... more Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of sixteen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of migrants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European politics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Romeo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe.
This wide-ranging collection of essays elaborates on some of the most pressing issues in contempo... more This wide-ranging collection of essays elaborates on some of the most pressing issues in contemporary postcolonial society in their transition from conflict and contestation to dialogue and resolution. It explores from new angles questions of violent conflict, forced migration, trafficking and deportation, human rights, citizenship, transitional justice and cosmopolitanism. The volume focuses more specifically on the gendering of violence from a postcolonial perspective as it analyses unique cases that disrupt traditional visions of violence by including the history of empire and colony, and its legacies that continue to influence present-day configurations of gender, race, nationality, class and sexuality. Part One maps out the gendered and racialized contours of conflict zones, from war zones, prisons and refugee camps to peacekeeping missions and humanitarian aid, reframing the field and establishing connections between colonial legacies and postcolonial dynamics. Part Two explores how these conflict zones are played out not just outside but also within Europe, demonstrating that multicultural Europe is fraught with different legacies of violence and postcolonial melancholia. Part Three gives an idea of the kind of future that can be offered to post-conflict societies, defined as contact zones, by exploring opportunities for dialogue, restoration and reconciliation that can be envisaged from a gendered and postcolonial perspective through alternative feminist practices and the work of art and their redemptive power in mobilizing social change or increasing national healing processes. Though strongly anchored in postcolonial critique, the chapters draw from a range of traditions and expertise, including conflict studies, gender theory, visual studies, (new) media theory, sociology, race theory, international security studies and religion studies.
"This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcol... more "This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic through which to address questions of postcolonial historiography, geography, subjectivity, and epistemology.
Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple,diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the ‘postcolonial aesthetics’ through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries."
This book engages with the question of what makes Europe postcolonial and how memory, whiteness a... more This book engages with the question of what makes Europe postcolonial and how memory, whiteness and religion figure in representations and manifestations of European ‘identity’ and self-perception. To deconstruct Europe is necessary as its definition is now contested more than ever, both internally (through the proliferation of ethnic, religious, regional differences) and externally (Europe expanding its boundaries but closing its borders).
This edited volume explores a number of theoretical discussions on the meaning of Europe and proposes analyzing some of the deeds committed, both today and in the past, in the name of Europe by foregrounding a postcolonial approach. To deconstruct Europe as a postcolonial place does not imply that Europe’s imperial past is over, but on the contrary that Europe’s idea of self, and of its polity, is still struggling with the continuing hold of colonialist and imperialist attitudes. The objective of this volume is to account for historical legacies which have been denied, forgotten or silenced, such as the histories of minor and peripheral colonialisms (Nordic colonialisms or Austrian, Spanish and Italian colonialism) and to account for the realities of geographical margins within Europe, such as the Mediterranean and the Eastern border while tracing alternative models for solidarity and conviviality. The chapters deal with social and political formations as well as cultural and artistic practices drawing from different disciplinary backgrounds and methodological traditions. As such it creates an innovative space for comparative and cross-disciplinary exchanges.
Journal articles by sandra ponzanesi
Transnational Screens, 2022
This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals thro... more This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals through the frame of transnational screens. For this purpose, the issue develops around the twofold notion of the intellectual as a filmmaker and the intellectual as an object of filmmaking. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this interrelationship expands notions of postcolonial theory and practice regarding the aesthetic and political intervention of intellectuals in transnational screen culture. Many postcolonial figures have been influential not only in rethinking the ways in which representation should be conceived and theorized but also in inspiring new forms of visuality and aesthetics through their life and work. These figures include Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, and Stuart Hall, and others explored in this issue, such as Toni Morrison, Raoul Peck, Ai Weiwei, and Steve McQueen. The special issue also includes exclusive interviews with Ai Weiwei and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists, intellectuals, activists, and filmmakers whose engagement with postcolonial debates, and more broadly with the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking, have contributed to a reshaping of contemporary postcolonial realities and discourses, in scholarship and the public sphere.
https://www.tandfonline.com/.../screening-intellectuals
Transnational Screens, 2022
This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals thro... more This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals through the frame of transnational screens. For this purpose, the issue develops around the twofold notion of the intellectual as a filmmaker and the intellectual as an object of filmmaking. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this interrelationship expands notions of postcolonial theory and practice regarding the aesthetic and political intervention of intellectuals in transnational screen culture. Many postcolonial figures have been influential not only in rethinking the ways in which representation should be conceived and theorized but also in inspiring new forms of visuality and aesthetics through their life and work. These figures include Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, and Stuart Hall, and others explored in this issue, such as Toni Morrison, Raoul Peck, Ai Weiwei, and Steve McQueen. The special issue also includes exclusive interviews with Ai Weiwei and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists, intellectuals, activists, and filmmakers whose engagement with postcolonial debates, and more broadly with the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking, have contributed to a reshaping of contemporary postcolonial realities and discourses, in scholarship and the public sphere.
Communication, Culture and Critique, 2022
This commentary proposes a reorientation of diaspora studies towards new configurations of partic... more This commentary proposes a reorientation of diaspora studies towards new configurations of participation and identification. Digital media affordances in this sense are just such new configurations that enable, sustain and multiply diasporic encounters through social media platforms, digital devices and infrastructures. The emerging digital diasporas do not oppose or replace traditional diasporas, but on the contrary further expand and transform their agency in the digital age Mihaela Nedelcu (2018). In our thinking, we are inconversation with, as well as departing from, previous notions of diaspora. In this commentary, we briefly establish the complex and non-linear genealogy of the term, as partaking in multiple disciplinary takes and discursive orientations, and then migrating to the new realm of technology and digital connectedness.
Digital Migration Practices and the Everyday, 2022
This commentary proposes a reorientation of diaspora studies towards new configurations of partic... more This commentary proposes a reorientation of diaspora studies towards new configurations of participation and identification. Digital media affordances in this sense are just such new configurations that enable, sustain and multiply diasporic encounters through social media platforms, digital devices and infrastructures. The emerging digital diasporas do not oppose or replace traditional diasporas, but on the contrary further expand and transform their agency in the digital age Mihaela Nedelcu (2018). In our thinking, we are inconversation with, as well as departing from, previous notions of diaspora. In this commentary, we briefly establish the complex and non-linear genealogy of the term, as partaking in multiple disciplinary takes and discursive orientations, and then migrating to the new realm of technology and digital connectedness.
Special Issue: "Digital Migration Practices and the Everyday.", 2022
This special issue explores the role that digital technology plays in the lives of migrants. It d... more This special issue explores the role that digital technology plays in the lives of migrants. It does so by paying close attention to governmental and supranational organizations as well as to subjective and affective dimensions of the everyday. Digital migration practices emerge as complex negotiations in the digital media sphere between infrastructural bias and agential opportunities, contesting racial practices as well as enabling digitally mediated bonds of solidarity and intimacy. The issue offers nuanced critical perspectives ranging from surveillance capitalism, extractive humanitarianism, datafication, and border regimes to choreographies of care and intimacy in transnational settings, among other aspects. Renowned international scholars reflect on these issues from different vantage points. The closing forum section provides state-of-the-art commentaries on digital diaspora, affect and belonging, voice and visibility in the digital media sphere, queer migrant interventions in non-academic settings, and datafication and media infrastructures in “deep time.”
Postcolonial Studies, 2011
The aim of this special issue is to gauge the impact of postcolonial intellectuals in contemporar... more The aim of this special issue is to gauge the impact of postcolonial intellectuals in contemporary Europe from a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective. This is achieved by challenging the divide between public and private, inclusion and exclusion, and citizens and migrants, thereby creating counterpublics where sexual, ethnic, religious and other minorities stake their claims and play out their actions. For this purpose, the special issue will not review the standard figures in the postcolonial debate but focus on the ways in which intellectual labour is performed by critics as well as by artists, activists and writers, in order to recognize the impact of ‘intellectual engagements’ in the public sphere in their less visible and recognized manifestations as well.
Postcolonial Studies, 2021
The aim of this special issue is to gauge the impact of postcolonial intellectuals in contemporar... more The aim of this special issue is to gauge the impact of postcolonial intellectuals in contemporary Europe from a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective. This is achieved by challenging the divide between public and private, inclusion and exclusion, and citizens and migrants, thereby creating counterpublics where sexual, ethnic, religious and other minorities stake their claims and play out their actions. For this purpose, the special issue will not review the standard figures in the postcolonial debate but focus on the ways in which intellectual labour is performed by critics as well as by artists, activists and writers, in order to recognize the impact of ‘intellectual engagements’ in the public sphere in their less visible and recognized manifestations as well.
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Books by sandra ponzanesi
the realisation of a ‘coming after’ but also of the impossibility of not seeing the present as still very much working through the wounds of the past. Yet with the appearance of pseudo-concepts such as ‘post-truth’ after an equally imaginary ‘death of History’, the logic of the ‘post’, itself always already under questioning, may appear to have outlived its usefulness. How to make sense of postcolonial theory in Europe in the present? One way might be to renew its significance as world conflicts have entered a new ‘post-imperial phase’ with the return of ideologies of empire in various parts of the world. The essays in this volume address those questions at both a conceptual, theoretical level, and through the analysis of specific case studies. In the Introduction Paulo de Medeiros and Sandra Ponzanesi review the main questions outlined above in relation to the current debates in the Humanities from their respective disciplinary perspectives. The volume is organised in four sections, each containing four chapters. Even though all the chapters present a reflection on Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, some focus more specifically on aspects of the crisis in a global perspective such as humanitarian crisis and the role of mediatization of conflicts, to issues related to human rights, refugees, migrancy, environmental crisis to questions of memory and postmemory as well as the critique of art and utopian thought.
While recent discussions of migration into ‘Fortress Europe’ seem to assume that Europe has clearly demarcated geographic, political and cultural boundaries, this book argues that the reality is more complex. The book explores margins conceptually and positions margins and centres as open to negotiation and contestation and characterized by ambiguity. As such, margins can be contextualized in relation to hierarchies within Europe, with different processes involved in creating boundaries and borders between different kinds of Europes and Europeans. Deploying case studies from different places, such as Iceland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the UK, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Sicily, European colonies in the Caribbean and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors analyse how different geopolitical hierarchies intersect with racialized subject positions of diverse people living in Europe, while also exploring issues of gender, class, sexuality, religion and nationality. Some chapters draw attention to the fortification of Europe’s ‘borderland,’ while others focus on internal hierarchies within Europe, critiquing the meaning of spatial boundaries in an increasingly digitalized Europe. In doing so, the chapters interrogate the hierarchies at play in the processes of being and becoming ‘European’ and the ongoing impacts of race and colonialism.
This timely and thought-provoking collection will be of considerable significance to those in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in Europe.
Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple,diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the ‘postcolonial aesthetics’ through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries."
This edited volume explores a number of theoretical discussions on the meaning of Europe and proposes analyzing some of the deeds committed, both today and in the past, in the name of Europe by foregrounding a postcolonial approach. To deconstruct Europe as a postcolonial place does not imply that Europe’s imperial past is over, but on the contrary that Europe’s idea of self, and of its polity, is still struggling with the continuing hold of colonialist and imperialist attitudes. The objective of this volume is to account for historical legacies which have been denied, forgotten or silenced, such as the histories of minor and peripheral colonialisms (Nordic colonialisms or Austrian, Spanish and Italian colonialism) and to account for the realities of geographical margins within Europe, such as the Mediterranean and the Eastern border while tracing alternative models for solidarity and conviviality. The chapters deal with social and political formations as well as cultural and artistic practices drawing from different disciplinary backgrounds and methodological traditions. As such it creates an innovative space for comparative and cross-disciplinary exchanges.
Journal articles by sandra ponzanesi
https://www.tandfonline.com/.../screening-intellectuals
the realisation of a ‘coming after’ but also of the impossibility of not seeing the present as still very much working through the wounds of the past. Yet with the appearance of pseudo-concepts such as ‘post-truth’ after an equally imaginary ‘death of History’, the logic of the ‘post’, itself always already under questioning, may appear to have outlived its usefulness. How to make sense of postcolonial theory in Europe in the present? One way might be to renew its significance as world conflicts have entered a new ‘post-imperial phase’ with the return of ideologies of empire in various parts of the world. The essays in this volume address those questions at both a conceptual, theoretical level, and through the analysis of specific case studies. In the Introduction Paulo de Medeiros and Sandra Ponzanesi review the main questions outlined above in relation to the current debates in the Humanities from their respective disciplinary perspectives. The volume is organised in four sections, each containing four chapters. Even though all the chapters present a reflection on Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, some focus more specifically on aspects of the crisis in a global perspective such as humanitarian crisis and the role of mediatization of conflicts, to issues related to human rights, refugees, migrancy, environmental crisis to questions of memory and postmemory as well as the critique of art and utopian thought.
While recent discussions of migration into ‘Fortress Europe’ seem to assume that Europe has clearly demarcated geographic, political and cultural boundaries, this book argues that the reality is more complex. The book explores margins conceptually and positions margins and centres as open to negotiation and contestation and characterized by ambiguity. As such, margins can be contextualized in relation to hierarchies within Europe, with different processes involved in creating boundaries and borders between different kinds of Europes and Europeans. Deploying case studies from different places, such as Iceland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the UK, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Sicily, European colonies in the Caribbean and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors analyse how different geopolitical hierarchies intersect with racialized subject positions of diverse people living in Europe, while also exploring issues of gender, class, sexuality, religion and nationality. Some chapters draw attention to the fortification of Europe’s ‘borderland,’ while others focus on internal hierarchies within Europe, critiquing the meaning of spatial boundaries in an increasingly digitalized Europe. In doing so, the chapters interrogate the hierarchies at play in the processes of being and becoming ‘European’ and the ongoing impacts of race and colonialism.
This timely and thought-provoking collection will be of considerable significance to those in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in Europe.
Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple,diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the ‘postcolonial aesthetics’ through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries."
This edited volume explores a number of theoretical discussions on the meaning of Europe and proposes analyzing some of the deeds committed, both today and in the past, in the name of Europe by foregrounding a postcolonial approach. To deconstruct Europe as a postcolonial place does not imply that Europe’s imperial past is over, but on the contrary that Europe’s idea of self, and of its polity, is still struggling with the continuing hold of colonialist and imperialist attitudes. The objective of this volume is to account for historical legacies which have been denied, forgotten or silenced, such as the histories of minor and peripheral colonialisms (Nordic colonialisms or Austrian, Spanish and Italian colonialism) and to account for the realities of geographical margins within Europe, such as the Mediterranean and the Eastern border while tracing alternative models for solidarity and conviviality. The chapters deal with social and political formations as well as cultural and artistic practices drawing from different disciplinary backgrounds and methodological traditions. As such it creates an innovative space for comparative and cross-disciplinary exchanges.
https://www.tandfonline.com/.../screening-intellectuals
We do so by exploring the ways in which Somali migrant women living across different cities in Europe engage in everyday digital practices. The central question that underlines this comparative investigation is how transnational multisitedness, different generations and urban localities play a role in contemporary Somali diasporic formations and take shape through digital media. We consider the multi-sitedness of Somali diaspora in light of the emergent transnational potentials of communications technologies, while keeping in focus gendered dynamics and intersectional aspects; how generation plays into processes of diasporic cultural change and continuity; and how spatial relationships of belonging are shaped by the communicative spaces that mobile devices and software platforms afford. Our findings show that to better understand the role of digitally mediated experiences, we need to focus on everyday media environments within contexts of international mobility across continental borders marked by postcolonial traces.
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foregrounds encounters and trespassings. It focuses on the analysis of
several films that deal with the migrant drama but in particular on two
films that have received wide international acclaim: Io Sto con la Sposa
[On The Bride’s Side] (2014) and Fuocoammare [Fire at Sea] (2016). The
films deal with migration as a humanitarian crisis but are not simple
acts of denunciation. They are also not straightforward documentaries
but offer innovative visual registers that defy categorization into fixed
genres, such as the road movie or observational documentary. On the
Bride’s Side uses the format of a travelling wedding party that disregards
both legislation restricting free mobility in Europe and the cynicism
about the hopelessness of the migrant condition. The film was realized
through an online crowdfunding campaign unprecedented in Italy.
Fire at Sea presents the tragedy of Lampedusa outside of the regular
schemes and screens, combining the migrant drama with the ordinary
lives of people on the island, mostly through the perspective of a
12-year-old boy, Samuele, whose lazy eye becomes a metaphor for
the short-sightedness of Europe. Both films propose a new aesthetic
of the border, forging new imaginaries for Europe where spaces of
solidarity and cosmopolitanism are still possible.
tionships that postcolonial subjects have with their history and geopoliti
cal affiliations.
a feeling of “compassion fatigue” (Möller 1999; Sontag 2003) among viewers who consume images of “distant suffering” from the safe space of their own living rooms (Boltanski 1993; Chouliaraki 2006, 2013). This has prompted not only a sense of context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011) but also a crisis of empathy.
How should we respond to, and continue to engage with, disasters, underdevelopment, pandemics, and political conflicts, as part of multiple competing worlds of short-term and long-term humanitarian crises?
The booming virtual reality (VR) industry has broken new ground as allegedly the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk 2015; Bailenson 2018; Uricchio 2018; Raessens 2019) which puts the viewer in other people’s shoes. VR as a unique and novel form of “immersive technologies” has been postulated as a “technology of feelings,” a good technology that promotes compassion, connection, and intimacy by allowing the viewer to experience the lives of those who are distant others, e.g., migrants or refugees. This chapter explores the enthusiasm, but also the ethical
reservations, surrounding this new media genre of post-humanitarian appeal through the analysis of some VR projects dealing with migration and refugee issues, namely Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria (2012), Gabo Arora and Chris Milk’s Clouds over Sidra (2015), Ben C. Solomon and Imraan Ismail’s The Displaced, (2015), and Tamara Shogaolu’s Queer in a Time of Forced Migration (2020).
This chapter combines a top-down perspective (data system) with a bottom-up perspective (data subjects) on the IND’s data system by integrating an analysis of data and information about Syrian refugee women present in the IND system with the experiences of the women that provided the information.
The result is a moving as well as very informative collection of responses, experiences and insights of five Syrian women refugee women who are in, or have been through the IND’s decision-making process and who speak back to the system, producing alternative knowledge and representations to the dominant and mainstream stories of migration and integration in the Netherlands.
multiple axes of categorization that coexist and co-construct identity. This chapter
charts the advantages of intersectional approaches by focusing on migrant youths’
use of digital media for the articulation of their online identities. First, having surveyed
the literature, we advocate moving both beyond isolationist approaches to the
study of digital identities and beyond mainstream understandings of digital culture as
either liberating (utopian perspectives) or disenfranchising (techno-deterministic approaches
to digital media). Intersectional feminist studies of migration and technologies allow
for exploring the more nuanced and fluid realm of online worlds without losing
sight of how power relationships get reorganized and reformed online.
Ca' Foscari University of Venice, VIU
26-27 May 2022
The conference “Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe” deals with the topic of postcolonial publics expressed and engaged through “citizen media” and art in a postcolonial Europe. Keynotes addresses and sessions will serve to interrogate the proliferation of digital media and global culture, and the changes happening in public intellectual engagements.
Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.
This international conference focuses on the connection between the media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also subjects individuals as well as groups to increased datafied migration management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression.
This conference pays particular attention to the everyday use of digital media for the support of transnational lives, emotional bonds and cosmopolitan affiliations, focusing also on the role digital media play in shaping local/urban and national diasporic formations. This is because it becomes increasingly important to give everyday digital media usage a central role in investigations of transnational belonging, digital intimacy, diasporic community (re)production, migrant subject formation, long-distance political participation, urban social integration and local/national self-organization.
Therefore we need to examine individual and collective user practices within the wider historical and cultural contexts of media studies, cultural studies and postcolonial cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity, geographies and the everyday. This also creates new challenges for cross-disciplinary dialogues that require an integration of ethnography with digital methods and critical data studies in order to look at the formation of identity and experience, representation, community building, and creating spaces of belongingness.
Contributions are welcome from any field of study that engages with questions about how technology and social media usages mediate contemporary migration experiences, not only within media and communication studies, or digital and internet studies but also in neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, postcolonial studies, gender studies, race studies, psychology, law, visual studies, conflict studies, criminology, sociology, critical theory, political theory and international relations.
Contributions that explore non-media-centric entry points by focusing on users’ digital practices and foregrounding ethnographic exploration as a uniting framework are especially welcome.
The conference is part of the ERC project CONNECTINGEUROPE, Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Affective digital practices and the politics of emotion
Digital diaspora
Cosmopolitanism
Cities and urban belonging
Translocality and transnationalism
Co-presence and togetherness
Cultural capital
Migrant visualization
Appification of migration
Platformization of migrant lives
Gender and critical race
The migration industry of connectivity
Digital ethnography
Transnational authoritarianism
Networked conflicts
Datafication and surveillance
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Submissions for panels should be submitted via e-mail to [email protected] by 31 January 2021.
Submission for panels should include a chairperson, a rationale for the panel (250 words), and the names of three speakers including their abstract (250 words) and biographical note (150 words).
Abstracts should be submitted electronically, using the online submission system by 15 February 2021.
Submissions for papers should include an abstract (max 300 words) and short biographical note (150 words) about the author including her/his current position and interest in the field of digital media and migration.
For further questions please mail: [email protected]
The PDF of this call for papers is available here.
http://connectingeuropeproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/CFP_MB.pdf
PIN
The PIN – Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics network, not only focuses on postcolonial intellectuals as outspoken individuals, but also challenges the traditional definition of the “public intellectual” by emphasizing the role of artists, writers, activists and social movements in shaping postcolonial publics and knowledges. Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics network (PIN) brings together an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars to investigate the role of postcolonial public intellectuals as crucial actors in renewing the function of the humanities and of democratic participation in Europe.
Postcolonial thinking has challenged the stability of discourses on culture, globalisation, economics, human rights and politics. Postcolonial thinking, as a form of mediation and displacement of worldviews, triggered a re-evaluation of the complex connections between culture, class, economy, gender and sexuality. This conference aims to engage with such postcolonial displacements.
Postdoc 'Digital Crossings in Europe. Gender, Diaspora and Belonging' (0,8 FTE)
There are 3 Phd positions available and one Postdoc position available within the project ‘Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging’ (CONNECTINGEUROPE). This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), by way of a Consolidator Grant awarded to the principal investigator (PI) Prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi (Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands) and will be running at Utrecht University, the Netherlands from 2016-2021.
The project aims to investigate the relation between migration and digital technologies, in particular the way in which the ‘connected migrant’ contributes to new forms of European integration and cosmopolitan citizenship. The project explores digital diasporas in relation to issues of gender, ethnicity and affective belonging, focusing on how new technologies enhance new forms of connectivity between the homeland and destination countries, bus also across diasporas. The project pioneers a new interdisciplinary method that combines media studies, postcolonial theories, digital humanities and gender studies, drawing from the humanities and social science. It proposes a comparative approach, based on qualitative digital methods, that focuses on Somali, Romanian and Turkish women migrants who have settled in some of Europe’s main cities (London – PhD1, Amsterdam – PhD2 and Rome – PhD3) and the way in which they keep digitally and emotionally connected to their homeland cities (Mogadishu, Bucharest, Istanbul – Postdoc). The project will chart how different forms of migration (labour, postcolonial and post socialist) impact on the new European order at the local and transnational levels.
Within the project, three PhD positions and a postdoc position (advertised separately) will be available for the following projects:
1. PhD1 - Digital Diasporas: London.
2. PhD2 - Digital Diasporas: Amsterdam.
3. PhD3 - Digital Diasporas: Rome.
4. Postdoc: The Politics of Home
The three PhDs will have to conduct fieldwork across the three migrant groups (Turkish, Somali, Romanian) in the proposed city (London, Amsterdam or Rome). The interaction, collaboration and sharing of data with the other PhDs and the postdoc is expected. The PhD and Postdoc candidates will of course have the opportunity to fill in the details of these projects or expand on them, based on their expertise, the data they gather and their own research ideas, all in consultation with the principal investigator.
If you are interested, please contact the project director, Prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi ([email protected]) for more information. For a short description of the project please click the following link: www.digitaleurope.nl/.
To apply for the positions please go to:
Postdoc: https://www.academictransfer.com/employer/UU/vacancy/30039/lang/en/
PhD positions: https://www.academictransfer.com/employer/UU/vacancy/30040/lang/en/