DECENTERING MIGRATION AND ​
DECOLONIZING HUMANITARIANISM
 
Fall 2020 SERIES | 3 WEBINARS

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.
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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.
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​Keywords | Migration, care, Global South, humanitarian protection, asylum seekers, Australia, South-South humanitarianism, refugees, displacement, Indonesia, sovereignty, hospitality.

Ilana Feldman: "Humanitarian Rights and Palestinian Presence" & Pamela Ballinger: "Provincializing the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees"

Series Conversation
Webinar | November 12, 2020    Workshop | November 13, 2020
In this webinar, our panelists Pamela Ballinger and Ilana Feldman discuss how refugees—international and internally displaced, recognized and unrecognized by various institutions—shape the political, legal, ethical, and lived worlds of humanitarianism and human rights.
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​In her talk, “Humanitarian Rights and Palestinian Presence,” Ilana Feldman argues that Palestinians have long insisted both that humanitarianism is a right and that it entails specific obligations. Although the idea of humanitarian rights might seem an oxymoron, Palestinian efforts show that even as such demands may not have the force of law, they have, at least sometimes, been effective in changing practice.

​Pamela Ballinger presents a talk entitled “Provincializing the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees.” A rich body of scholarship has highlighted the particularistic and Eurocentric nature of the 1951 Convention. Less studied, however, are the ways in which the refugee definition also excluded many European displaced persons from recognition. Ballinger’s talk recuperates the complex efforts to categorize displacees in the Italian peninsula in the early postwar period, notably migrants produced by Italian decolonization. The Italian case offers an alternative history to the Convention, one that further provincializes (to employ Chakrabarty’s term) the regime of international law and assistance developed around the Convention.

About the speakers: Ilana Feldman is Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics (University of California Press, 2018). Pamela Ballinger is Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights and Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is author of The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (Cornell University Press, 2020).
Moderators | Arzoo Osanloo, Cabeiri Robinson, Cristian Capotescu, Gözde Burcu Ege. 

​Co-Sponsors | Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies.
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​Keywords | UNRWA, post-WW I, settler-colonialism, Israel, Palestine, refugee protests, statelessness, British Military Administration (BMA), contemporary Italy, post-WW II, internally displaced people, Eurocentric exclusions.

Jessica Whyte: "'The Opposite of Humanity': Anti-colonial Challenges to International Humanitarian Law" & Emma Meyer: "Managing Migrants, Resettling Refugees"

Series Conversation
Webinar | December 3, 2020    Workshop | December 4, 2020
Our December panelists, ​Jessica Whyte and Emma Meyer, invite us to rethink the concepts of humanity, humanitarianism, and refuge making by focusing on the formerly unrecognized arenas and actors of humanitarianism in the Global South.

​Jessica Whyte's talk, "‘The Opposite of Humanity’: Anti-colonial Challenges to International Humanitarian Law” considers the contributions of post-colonial nations and national liberation movements to international humanitarian law in the 1970s. Rejecting the view that their role was to confirm the incipient universalism of the humanitarianism of the Red Cross, Whyte traces their attempt to re-orient international humanitarian law to serve struggles for decolonization.

​Emma Meyer, in “Managing Migrants, Resettling Refugees,” discusses mid-twentieth century, colonial-era efforts to regulate and control migrants of Indian descent crossing the Bay of Bengal became central to later systems of managing displacement in South Asia. Her talk focuses on Visakhapatnam, India, which has become a continuous site of resettlement for displaced people since WWII.

About the speakers: Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019). Emma Meyer holds a PhD in modern South Asian history from Emory University. Her research focuses on the intersections of migration, labor, citizenship, and humanitarianism.
Moderators | Arzoo Osanloo, Cabeiri Robinson, Cristian Capotescu, Mediha Sorma

​Co-Sponsors | South Asia Center, Department of Law, Societies, & Justice, Department of History, Department of Philosophy.

​Keywords | Geneva Conference, humanitarian law, wars of decolonization, Red Cross, wars of national liberation, colonial violence, Eurocentric vision of humanity, Vietnam War, new forms of warfare, Indian Evacuees from Burma, WW II, era of decolonization, South Asia, refuge making, refugee agency.
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