Responding to Crisis: Forced Migration and the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

According to a recent Amnesty International report, 23,000 people are believed to have lost their lives trying to reach Europe since 2000. In Iain Chambers's words, '[t]heir bodies rest on the sea bed, unconsciously contributing to the solidifying of the sea, transforming a site of transit into a mounting barrier' (Chambers 2008). This situation is undoubtedly a crisis; not only of geopolitics, but also of values. Often unrecognised and unaccounted for, these deaths demand a response not just from advocacy groups, political organisations and governments, but also from those concerned with narrative, representation and the arts. The humanities are central to an exploration of social and cultural knowledge about contemporary migration and its effects. Focusing on the ways in which we interpret, represent and conceptualise forced migration in the twenty-first century, the arts and humanities provide an alternative perspective on a terrain usually considered to be that of law, sociology and political science. We aim to develop activist and interventionist models of the arts and humanities which have a positive impact on migrants' lives. This approach is undergirded by a rigorous conceptual analysis of three key questions: how adequate are current political, cultural, and social responses to forced migration? What is the status of humanitarian values in this crisis? And how can we narrate ethically this deathly turn in contemporary migration? Political, creative and academic sectors approach these issues in distinct ways. The aim of this project is to connect different scholarly disciplines on the issue of contemporary forced migration, and provide 'contact zones' between creative, theoretical, academic, and activist responses to this unfolding crisis. Moving beyond a consideration of the ethics of witnessing these multiple deaths, this project posits the arts and humanities as a means of changing public attitudes and influencing policy. It seeks to bring about the transformation of material possibilities through a heightened awareness of representational acts. Three international workshops will bring together artists, filmmakers, poets, practitioners, and scholars to draw on the creative energies of interdisciplinary working to develop collaborative 'response' as a methodological mode, including new creative works. As well as providing a platform for the existing work of migrant artists, such as Zineb Sedira, the ZALAB (Italy) migrant film collective and Platforma (UK), we will commission artists, photographers and poets to respond to the themes and outcomes of the project. Our project intervenes in and contributes to established community-cultural events, such as the Runnymede Literary Festival, by placing forced migration on the agenda. The project partners map a trajectory across varied geo-political contexts. In the UK, Keele and London provide peripheral and metropolitan perspectives on the migrant experience, while Glasgow situates questions of migration and national identity within a politically devolved Scotland. Our partnership with L'Orientale University, Naples, extends the geographical reach of the project to southern Europe. This will focus our attention on the Mediterranean as a visible site of the current failure to address the slowly unfolding crisis of forced migration at Europe's borders.