Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides

Seminar theme

Refugees, immigrants, and indigenous peoples are typically constructed as separate categories within nation-states, and thus are studied in relation to white “natives,” but seldom in relation to one another.  Immigrants, indigenous people and refugees are conventionally imagined as communities with little in common.

This seminar, jointly organised by SKOK (University of Bergen) and The Center for Race and Gender (UC Berkeley) will tackle the question: how do these communities, and the fields of study focused on these communities, intersect? A key question for the seminar will be how these communities are imagined to diverge through conceptions of time and space, and how such imaginaries are gendered. The participants will explore convergence and divergence among these three populations with respect to legal status and the attendant social and material contexts as well as cultural/political discourses and cultural forms and practices, particularly the “ground up” imaginaries and practices of natives, immigrants, and refugees.

Programme:

28th of August

09.30 - 10.00 Welcome, about the project Christine M. Jacobsen and Leti Volpp  

10.00 - 11.00 Leti Volpp  Native/Immigrant/Refugee: US Legal Imaginaries 

11.00 - 12.00 Marry-Anne Karlsen  How long time is enough?’ Irregularity, time and belonging in Norway 

12.00 - 13.00 Debarati Sanyal  Messengers from Melilla's Border 

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch (at your own expence)

14.00 - 15.00 Kari Jegerstedt Caught between colonial violence and eco-tourism: A second look at Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (2000)

15.00 – 16.00 Stine Bang Svensen   Remapping land: Indigenous lands, colonization and migration 

16.00 - 17.00 Discussion 

29th of August

09.30 - 10.30 Kari Anne Drangsland Troubling the periodization of waiting

10.30 - 11.30 Fantasia Painter  Crossing Paths in the Borderlands: Indigenous Life and US Militarization at US-Mexico Border

11.30 - 12.30 Astrid Dankertsen  Colonial hauntings in the Sámi-Norwegian inbetween space 

12.30 - 13.00 Discussion