You can see a recording of this event on YouTube

Why Integration is a Delicate Art that needs everyone’s Languages

24 November 2020, 3pm

In this seminar Alison will discuss the fraught and contested concept of integration, the ways it is used in differing policy contexts worldwide, the hopes it embodies and the utopianism of its demands, together with the models and bridges which are the focus of academic and policy discussions. She will focus on the social scientific basis to the policy context and the demands for measurable results for policy endeavours before turning to an incarnational, anthropological and humanities approach to questions of human integral development and the way arts may soften, and lighten the work of integrating for all.

Speaker Bio: Alison Phipps holds the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts and is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies. She was PI of AHRC Large Grant ‘Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the body, law and the state’ (2014-2017). She Co-Directs the GCRF £20M South-South Migration Hub, MIDEQ and is PI of AHRC £2M Network Plus Cultures for Sustainable and Inclusive Peace (2020-2023). She is an academic, activist and published poet.

More about Alison and the UNESCO RILA team can be found at our website: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/

Series Schedule

• 24 November 2020 - Why Integration is a Delicate Art that needs everyone’s Languages
• 26 January 2021 - Finding Ways through Eurospace: African Movers Re-Viewing Europe from the Inside
• 9 March 2021 - “Culture and humanity” and “The Afrocentric Paradigm as a New Episteme”

This free online seminar series aims to promote critical thinking and creative ways of unpacking the political and epistemological questions in the production and circulation of knowledge on forced migration (i.e. often dominated by researchers in the Global North) and, at the same time, highlight the often muted voices of the people with lived experience.

The series will conclude with an open discussion with scholars of migration, academics, practitioners, and people with lived experience.

The series is organised by PhD researchers from the Universities of Leeds and Glasgow.

Context for the Series:

In a 2019 report, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) indicates that, of the 79.5 million forcibly displaced people in the world, 85 percent remain in the developing countries. Furthermore, a report by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation (2019) indicated that more than 70% of Sub-Saharan African migrants move within the continent. Many, who live in refugee camps, face the prospect of protracted encampment with no hope in sight while those in urban areas live in desolate squalors in the periphery of society. And condemned to life without livelihoods in the ‘modern camp’, which has become the ‘political and juridical hinterland’ (Stonebridge, 2018), they embark on perilous journeys in search of safety and better life opportunities.

With the increase in number, in recent years of Europe bound migration, a great deal of scholarship, policy research and intellectual resource has been invested in understanding and containing the migration movements from the Global South. However, the plethora of existing scholarship, policy debates and knowledge production and circulation on migration studies remain to be largely drawn to and centred in the Global North. In other words, migrants in the Global South continue to be used as ‘materials of knowledge’ for policy response rather than active owners of their lived-experience and their destinies. Likewise, the sending states are devoid of their ‘epistemological agency’, which according to Mamdani (2013), is ‘the key to unlocking the secret of native history’ with scientific research being that which gives access to one’s own history.

This quest for “knowledge” has led to differentiated hierarchies of ‘imaginative geographies’ (Andrucki, 2013) of the “Global North” and “Global South” whereby the former is represented, both in ‘modernity’ and civilizational terms, as the ‘suitable destination’ and a place of ‘ontological security’ (Giddens, 1991) whereas the latter is imagined in the colonial lens of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. This stark contrast between the ‘cartographies of migration’ and the production and circulation of knowledge about the phenomenon of forced migration raises fundamental questions of political intelligibility, ‘epistemological agency’ and ‘ontological security’ of the migrant population in question.

• Is there a scope for political intelligibility of the increasingly nascent category of involuntarily displaced migrants?
• How are the precarious states of ‘being’ of the involuntarily displaced migrants represented in political life?
• How is the phenomenon of ‘forced migration’ constructed and represented in the Global North?
• How are migrants’ stories, capabilities and resilience as well as vulnerabilities, precarities and carceralities represented in the existing (often Euro-centric) scholarship?
• Is there a scope for other ways of knowing and imagining the incarcerated, illegalised, exceptionalised and muted figure of the forced migrant?

Engaging with academics, practitioners, policy makers and migrants with ‘embodied knowledge’ and ‘insider status’ in the sociology of migration, this public seminar series aims to ‘interrogate’ the persistency of socio-political, epistemic, and representational inequalities (and fallacies) inherent in the narratives and constructions of forced migration as a ‘threat’ and forced migrants as ‘objects’ of elimination and containment. Moreover, the series aims not only to shed light on the vagaries of the precarious life and ‘biopolitical filtering’ (Salter, 2004, 2008) that forced migrants are subjected to but also their stories, histories, cultures, ways of knowing and unknowing as well as their struggles. In doing so, the seminar series will focus on the following suggested themes:

• Negotiating integration through the arts and language
• Beyond volitional(ity) and forcibl(ity): tracking migrants’ agentive roles in negotiating (im)-mobilities
• ‘Mobile homes’: ‘travelling cultures’, rituals, ‘artefacts’ and filial piety
• Modes (strategies) of survival in carceral cartographies
• (De)-silencing and (de)-effacing the refugee: Thinking with migrants, listening to migrant perspectives
• The ‘villain’ as a ‘hero’: ‘Good smugglers’ as enablers and the state as immobiliser
• Where to integrate to?: ‘Integration’ as a colonial continuity thesis
• On ‘decolonisation’ of education: Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies
• What gets published and who gets published in field of migration?

About the Series Organisers:

Tesfalem Yemane: Tesfalem is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, School of Sociology and Social Policy. Building on Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘soft power’, he examines the destination preferences of Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers who arrive in the UK and their post-arrival experiences. In addition, Tesfalem works as an Employment and Education Advisor for RETAS Leeds. He also worked as the Operations Director of Growing Points, a charity that works with migrants across England and Wales. His co-authored book chapter, ‘Steps to Settlement for Refugees: A Case Study’ (2019) traces the refugee journey towards citizenship in the UK. For more information on Tesfalem’s research interests, please visit his university profile.

Kheira Arrouche: Kheira is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, School of Sociology and Social Policy. Her research explores the mobility pathways sub-Saharan migrants undertake and interplaying forces that shape their (im)mobility experiences. Through her ethnographic research, Kheira aims to contribute to the critical debates about transit migration and im-mobility studies as well as examining the intricate ways the migrants exercise their agency to overcome such experiences. For more details about Kheira’s research interests, please visit her university profile.

Souad Boumechaal: Souad is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. Souad’s research examines the ideological discourses around the English language within Algerian higher education with a particularly focus on how global forces such as internationalisation of higher education are shaping the status of language education in postcolonial Algeria. Through the theoretical lens of linguistic imperialism, her research explores how the promotion of the English language at the expense of local languages could be a ‘threat’ to the multilingual nature of Algeria, preventing both teachers and students from taking ownership of their education.

Hyab Yohannes: Hyab is currently a PhD researcher and graduate teaching assistant at the University of Glasgow and holder of the UNESCO RILA PhD Scholarship. He worked formerly for local charities and international organisations in Egypt, including UNHCR, IOM, Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) and Saint Andrew’s Refugee Services (StARS). Hyab is involved in academic and non-academic professional roles in the UK. More details about Hyab’s research interests and professional experience can be found on his student profile and personal website.

Contact:

For further information or inquiries about the Seminar Series, please contact Kheira Arrouche at sska@leeds.ac.uk

Top Image: Sub-saharan migrants trying to reach Algeria taken by Kheira Arrouche during fieldwork in 2019.

Sub-Saharan migrants stuck in transit, Oran, Algeria; Photo credit: Kheira Arrouche 2019