Anne McNevin: "Sovereignty, Welcome, and Epistemic Hospitality"
Inaugural Lecture & Quarter Keynote
Webinar | October 8, 2020 Workshop | October 9, 2020
This inaugural event in our year-long Humanitarianisms webinar series explores forms of compassion and care for human suffering through an Indigenous lens. In this virtual conversation, Arzoo Osanloo, Cabeiri Robinson, and Cristian Capotescu speak with Anne McNevin about Aboriginal gestures of hospitality towards refugees in Australia.
In 2010, Australian Aboriginal elders and activists began to issue First Nation passports to refugees and asylum seekers detained and deterred under the terms of Australian border security. How might this gesture of welcome be read in light of contending sovereignties at stake? In this talk McNevin reflects on the epistemic conditions that shape the reception of this gesture. Building out from this example, she draws on Indigenous articulations of sovereignty, responsibility, and care as sources of theory about hospitality. Examining some of the limits to engaging those ideas in abstraction, she works towards a notion of epistemic hospitality as a way of approaching an exchange of knowledge about hospitality between putative hosts and guests, and across the putative terrain of the Global North and South. About the speaker: Anne McNevin is Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research in New York. She is author of Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political, and co-editor of the journal, Citizenship Studies. Her recent publications examine the transnational governmental regimes that shape the experience of refugees and migrants in and around Indonesia. She is working on a new book that aims to bring a world beyond bordered states into the realm of serious political consideration. |
Moderators | Arzoo Osanloo, Cabeiri Robinson, Cristian Capotescu.
Co-Sponsors | Center for Global Studies and Department of Political Science. Keywords | Migration, care, Global South, humanitarian protection, asylum seekers, Australia, South-South humanitarianism, refugees, displacement, Indonesia, sovereignty, hospitality. |