BCMCR Research Seminar – Journalism, Activism, Community – Everyday bordering and the hinterlands of resistance

1600-1730 Wednesday 6 February 2019
C284, Curzon B, Birmingham City University

Amanda Egbe (University of Bedfordshire) + Rastko Novakovic – Where were you in 1992?
We were fighting racism and fascism on the streets of London. We were trying to resist and survive the violent ethno-nationalism in Yugoslavia. Where were you in 92′? What political actions or groups were you involved in, in 1992? What were your modes of activism? What technologies were you using to communicate? Moving between the personal and the collective, between then and now, these questions have directed our visual and textual exploration during our residency at the MayDay Rooms. We also encourage and invite others to help us explore these questions. We are looking for gestures of resistance and action, those that persist, and those that have fallen away. Familiar and little-known materials and images will be recombined by using audio-visual interviews and computer-based analysis side by side. We will find elements of recognition, identification, resemblance and difference. The project uses pan.do/ra, a free, open source media archive platform, which has been developed by Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert at 0x2620

Prof. Nira Yuval-Davis (University of East London) Everyday bordering
The lecture explores cotemporary bordering and the ways in which borders have moved from the margins into the centre of everyday lives. Connecting everyday bordering to the neo-liberal globalisation’s double crisis of governability and governmentality, the lecture links everyday bordering to the rise of autochthonic right and to the transformation of citizenship duties, transforming citizens to unpaid untrained borderguards. It also examines the spread of grey zones and limbo spaces in and outside the borders and the ways more and more people embody borders instead of crossing them.

About the speakers:
Amanda Egbe is an artist, filmmaker and Lecturer in Media Production at the University of Bedfordshire. Rastko Novakovićis an artist working with the moving image, active in trade union and housing struggles. Together, over the past 18 years, they have created short and feature films, participatory videos, web-based projects, expanded cinema and a site-specific panorama.

Nira Yuval-Davis is Professor Emeritus, Honorary Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London. She has been the President of the Research Committee on Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnic Relations of the International Sociological Association, founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism and the international research network on Women In Militarized Conflict Zones. She is the winner of the 2018 International Sociological Association Distinguished Award for Excellence in Research and Practice. Her books include Racialized Boundaries, 1992, Unsettling Settler Societies, 1995, Gender and Nation,1997, The Politics of Belonging, 2011,Women Against Fundamentalism, 2014 and Bordering (Forthcoming). Her works have been translated into more than ten languages.