Recent Refugee Flows in Europe: Challenges and Responses

Alison Phipps

University of Glasgow

Gifts are in the Feet

The Epic Story

Of the hardening of bordersagainst kith and kin

And the softening of borders of skin.

Conditional Hospitality: FRONTEX and the Mediterranean (The Guardian)

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? … in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is

History.

(Derek Walcott )

Calais

States of Exception

‘They create a wasteland and call it peace.’

We have been here before.

And here we are again.

We are all border guards now

Health Care

Education

Housing

Employment

Banking

An Academic Border Guard

Where to go?

And to whom;To think anew the questions

We are posed By all those

Asking “Where to, when no one will have us?

We Refugees: Arendt (1943)

“The concomity of the European peoples went to pieces, when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.”

(Arendt: p119).

Sacred – in the original sense of ‘destined to die’

“Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples – if they keep their identity.” (p.112)

On ne parvient pas deuxfois.

Agamben: on ‘We Refugees’If in the system of the nation-state the refugee represents such a disquieting element, it is above all because […] the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty.

(p.117)

The Dominant Scripts

“The script is of therapeutic, technocratic, consumer militarism.

[Of Rights and Subjects, Sovereignty and Citizenship.]

And that script has failed.

It cannot make us safeAnd it cannot make us happy.” (Brueggemann)

Citizen’s ‘being-in-exodus’“It is only in a land where the spaces of state will have been perforated and topologically deformed, and the citizen will have learned to acknowledge the refugee that he [sic] himself is, that man’s political survival today will be imaginable.”

The offer of a Counter-storyPeople don’t change much through doctrine or argument or sheer cognitive appeal.

People don’t change much because of moral appeal – or at least not these days.

Offer of other models or old stories half forgotten, echoes from other peoples and places, tracings. (Brueggemann)

Invitation to a counter-story

“We Refugees” - a softening

2 ‘puncturing’ events (Badiou).

The change of heart by a politician and a country.

Aylan Kurdi image

Perforations: Imagining Inclusive Nationalism

“You have honoured us by making Scotland your home.”

FM Sturgeon

“When people say to me ‘why don’t we take care of our own’ I say – they are our own. This is their home.”

Minister for Europe: Yousaf.

Witness-bearing: Grand Synthe

Arts of Softening and Deterritorializing

Multimodal, multilingual Creative Interventions and Interruptions (translingual practice).

Curation of films, workshops, methods, poetry, drama, devising.

Sharing the World:

“Meeting a stranger outside of our own boundaries is rather easy, and even satisfies our aspirations, as long as we can return home and appropriate between ourselves what we have in this way discovered.

To be forced to limit and change our home, or our way of being at home, is much more difficult.” (Irigarary)

Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Decisions based on ‘Research Evidence’

“Revolution happens because everyone refused to go home” (Butler)

‘Harsh and Exciting’“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --over and over announcing your placein the family of things.” (Mary Oliver)