An online IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Asha Varadharajan (Nominated Fellow 2022-23; Queen's University, Canada)
Rethinking the Dynamics of Migration and Displacement
The first part of this presentation will offer some insights into the collaborative and cross-disciplinary projects I have created with artists, journalists, and political scientists. The second part thinks ‘the refugee’ with rather than against ‘the citizen.’ I argue that thinking ‘the citizen’ in and through the uncanny menace of ‘the refugee’ might attune us to both recognizable and invisible forms of displacement while reminding us of the singularity of the refugee. My aim is less to valorize displacement or celebrate transplanted identities than to remap the contours of exile and belonging. To explore the consequences of this remapping, I offer a new interpretation of Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope. By honouring "the economically superfluous and socially rootless" (Arendt), the film evokes a familiar but seldom appreciated form of habitation, that of denizen, encompassing the alterity of the refugee and the alienation of the citizen.
Please note this seminar is online-only. Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83178441780
Passcode: Kj7gnpP4
Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University in Canada. https://www.queensu.ca/english/people/asha-varadharajan. During her tenure as Nominated Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, she has substantially completed two books, one on the new realities of forced migration and involuntary displacement, and the second reconfiguring the discourse of (non)human rights. Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern in contemporaneity, violence against women and the discourse of human rights, decolonizing pedagogy, postcolonial temporalities, humanitarian intervention, and the legacy of The Frankfurt School. The most fun she has had writing was while composing her entry on Eric Idle for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The most chuffed she has been lately was on receiving the Queen's University 2021 Principal's Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award.