Event Date
Speakers:
Round table discussion featuring:
- Amarela Varela, Professor of Communication and Culture, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México
- Juan Antonio Del Monte, Professor of Cultural Studies, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
- María José Gutiérrez, Visiting Professor, Oxford College, Emory University
- Lucas Ruppel, PhD Student of Spanish/Human Rights, University of California, Davis
Moderated by Robert Irwin, Deputy Director, Global Migration Center
This roundtable proposes a dialogue among researchers who are experienced in working on the ground with vulnerable migrants (deported migrants, migrants in transit, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants) and share feminist and horizontalist approaches to our scholarship. We will discuss the contemporary dynamics of migration in the context of the American hemisphere with the aim of understanding the knowledge acquired by migrants that compels them to ponder alternative forms of living. We’re interested in exploring the interventions that migrants seek to make in the social spaces that they occupy both along their migration routes and at their destinations, and in analyzing how traumatic circumstances of flight can turn into creative processes of world making.
Looking beyond the forces that compel people to leave their homelands, we will focus on the agency, resilience and inventiveness of people in states of mobility as they seek to overcome the many obstacles and adversities they encounter on their journeys. Migrants must constantly adapt to their circumstances and cultivate atmospheres of care and wellbeing, whether while crossing hostile terrain, dodging persecution by criminal gangs or state authorities, waiting in shelters or encampments, or eventually settling in a new place, applying their growing world making skills as they go.
We will discuss what we can learn by listening to and thinking with displaced people, considering their practices of self and community care, strategies to establish feelings of home and community while in contexts of mobility, expressions of creativity and emotion, modes of political action, among others.