Nando Sigona – The politics of refugee voices: representations, narratives and memories

This paper reflects on existing debates surrounding the politics of ‘refugee voices’ by examining the relationship between representations, narratives, and memories of refugees’ experiences. Drawing on literature framed by post-structuralist and critical theories, the chapter problematizes assumptions regarding the existence of ‘a refugee voice’ on the one hand, and the extent to which academic and policy discourses often fail to listen to or to hear such voices on the other. It does so by identifying different configurations of the production and consumption of emic narratives of forced migration and displacement (that is, produced by forced migrants themselves), exploring the factors shaping these narratives and the embedded power relations that permeate them. In particular, the paper explores the practices and spaces which refugees enact and embody to contest the processes which lead to the silencing and marginalization of their narratives and experiences. To do so, the chapter is divided in three main sections which in turn address different yet interlinked manifestations of the ‘refugee voice’.

Nando Sigona is a lecturer and Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is also Research Associate at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and Refugee Studies Centre, both at the University of Oxford. His research interests include: statelessness, diasporas and the state; Romani politics and anti-Gypsyism; ‘illegality’ and the everyday experiences of undocumented migrant children and young people; and governance and governmentality of forced migration in the EU.
His work has appeared in a range of international academic journals, including Sociology, Social Anthropology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Identities and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is one of the editors of the Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford University Press 2014),  Associate Editor of Migration Studies, a refereed journal by Oxford University Press, and co-author of Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants (Pluto Press, 2014).

Rolf Halse: Muslim characters in the television serial 24

The presentation will centre on my PhD thesis – a thesis that I according to plans will defend 7 November this year at the University of Bergen. The thesis presents an examination of the US television serial 24’s representation of Muslim characters, and it explores to what extent the perception of these characters can be determined by the cultural and ethnic belonging of the audience. The main reason for choosing to study 24 exclusively is that after 9/11 the serial played a central role in the public debate about whether Muslims are being stereotyped in US television entertainment. Hence, I will discuss whether the critics of 24 have a valid point with regards to the show’s portrayal of negative stereotypes. I will also assess to what extent the serial’s effort to introduce Muslim counter-stereotypes proved to be an adequate response to the criticism.

Rolf Halse is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, at the University of Bergen. His research interests lie in popular culture, media audiences and the politics of representation. Halse has published his work in renowned media studies journals such as Critical Studies in Television: the International Journal of TV Studies, Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research and Nordicom Review.

Contact: Rolf Halse, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Box 7802, 5020, Bergen, Norway. E-mail: rolfhalse@infomedia.uib.no

PROVIR closing conference: Registration deadline 01.10.2014:

Conference registration deadline is 1^st of October. Send abstract and registration details to Marry-Anne.Karlsen@uni.noMore information about the PROVIR-project is available at http://rokkan.uni.no/sites/provir/ To register and pay registration fee, please use the following link: https://provir.hoopla.no/sales/#1609368930/

Closing conference PROVIR: “Exceptional welfare: Dilemmas in/of irregular migration”

How do states respond to the physical presence and needs of people it officially has excluded? To what extent do international human rights provide protection? How does migration control and welfare policy affect irregular migrants’ experiences and subjectivities?Physically present, but legally excluded, irregular migrants’ present societies with particular dilemmas relating to both sovereignty and human suffering. European countries increasingly involve welfare services in migration control, either by restricting access, or by using welfare services to detect/expose irregular migrants. This raises important questions concerning not only how migrants’ legal status influences their capacity to access services, but also the practical and ethical implications for service providers. Furthermore, it challenges the extent to which human rights actually limit the exclusionary powers of states and as such whether human rights are viable outside the confines of citizenship.

Provision of Welfare to Irregular Migrants (PROVIR) will be organizing its closing conference at the University of Bergen, 19^th – 21^th of November 2014. As an interdisciplinary project, the PROVIR research group and its international partners have combined a legal and social science approach to the provision of welfare to ‘irregular migrants’ in Norway, and comparatively in Europe, looking particularly at health care and education. The aim of the project has been to investigate the complex relationship between law, institutional practice, and migrants’ lived experience.

The closing conference aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines who are interested in the interplay between migration control and welfare policy. At the conference, findings from the PROVIR-project will be presented by the research team. In addition to presentations by key note speakers, the PROVIR research team also welcomes papers to be presented at workshops. The topics adressed will be:

• Irregular migrants’ legal situation regarding access to welfare provisions, either in national or international law.
• Institutional practices and responses by service providers.
• Migrants’ experiences, agency and embodiment.

PROGRAM:

Wednesday 19^th of November Venue: Det Akademiske Kvarter

18.00-19.30:   Letter to the king Film by Hisham Zaman

Letter to the King portrays five people on a day trip from a refugee camp to Oslo, a welcome change in an otherwise monotonous life. But we soon realize that each and every one of them has an agenda for their trip. All five will make decisive choices on this day, as they discover happiness, humiliation, love or fulfill a long-awaited revenge. The five stories are tied together by a letter, written by eighty-three year old Mirza. Mirza wants to hand over the letter to the King personally.

19.30-21.00:   Mediating irregular migration

The phenomenon of irregular migration is inextricably linked to its forms of mediation. Researchers, artists, authors, journalists and others contribute to the proliferation of images of the lives, and deaths, of those who migrate without proper authorization from the state. While stereotypical accounts of victims/criminals proliferate in mainstream media – (counter) representations that challenge such stereotyping also exist. The speakers in this panel discussion have all participated in producing and/or analysing images of irregular migration. Taking as their point of departure the film “Letter to the King”, they will discuss the poetics and politics of mediating irregular migration. What (im)possibilities does such mediation offer for current border struggles?

Plenary panel discussion with:

Hisham Zaman, Director (To be confirmed)

Shahram Khosravi, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm

Synnøve N. Bendixsen, Post-doctoral fellow PROVIR and Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen

Film and panel discussion organized in cooperation with Studentersamfunnet i Bergen (http://samfunnet.sib.no/)

Thursday 20^th of November Venue: Faculty of Law, Magnus Lagabøtes plass 1, University of Bergen

09.30-10.00:   Tea, coffee and registrations

10.00-10.15:   Welcome address

10.15-11.45: Precarious inclusion: Provision of welfare to irregular migrants in Norway

Presentation of PROVIR research findings by

Christine M. Jacobsen, Karl Harald Søvig, Synnøve Bendixsen, Andrea Sussman and Marry-Anne Karlsen

11.45-12.00: Coffee break

12.00-13.00:   Care Beyond Welfare?

Key note lecture by Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College (US)

13.00-14.00:   Lunch

14.00-16.00:   Workshops

16.00-16.15:   Coffee break

16.15-17.15:   Wrongs, Rights and Regularization

Key note lecture by Linda Bosniak, Distinguished Professor of Law, Rutgers School of Law–Camden (US)

19.00:             Conference dinner

Nøsteboden

Friday 21^st of November

Venue: Faculty of Law, Magnus Lagabøtes plass 1, University of Bergen

09.15-10.15:   Limiting Health Care as a Tool of Immigration Policy: Ethnographic Insights into Deservingness and Responses by Civil Society

Key note lecture by Heide Castañeda, Associate Professor and Graduate Director, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida (US)

10.15-10.30:   Coffee break

10.30-13.00:   Workshops

13.00-14.00:   Lunch

14.00-16.00:   Excepted, excluded or precariously included? Dilemmas in/of irregular migration Roundtable discussion by PROVIR research team and international partners:

Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Deputy Director of Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford (UK)

Milena Chimienti, Professor, University of Applied Science Western Switzerland – Social Work, Haute Ecole Fribourgeoise de Travail Social (HETS) (Switzerland)

Henriette Abbing, (Emiratus) Professor of Health Law, University of Utrecht (the Netherlands)

Christine M. Jacobsen, Professor, PROVIR project leader and Director of Center for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen (Norway)

Karl Harald Søvig, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Bergen (Norway)

Workshop Porgram:

 Download  workshop program here

Plural policing and the safety–security nexus in urban governance

Based on a study of policy frames in urban politics in Sweden, Malmö in particular, this article discusses the safety–security nexus in urban governance. It argues that perceived safety figures as an index of order and integration, and security becomes part and parcel of an expanded cohesion agenda which chain-links criminal justice, immigration control and civic integration. The expanded cohesion agenda in urban governance involves plural urban policing enabled by partnership agreements between the police and local authorities. The article demonstrates how force-based, pre-emptive crime-fighting is intertwined with preventative empowerment programmes; the ‘will to power’ is embedded in ‘the will to empower’. The preferred solution to social problems is extended force-based policing in combination with more police involvement in ‘social’ governance. It is argued that the expanded social cohesion agenda works to ‘criminalize’ specific subpopulations by replacing ‘social’ welfare politics with crime prevention programmes. Under an expanded cohesion agenda, crime prevention has less to do with preventing people from violating the law and more to do with securing the social order. Moreover, it is argued that security politics relates to a broader urban politics aimed at nurturing prosperous diversity considered to benefit the city as a whole, at the cost of problematic difference. In conclusion the article argues that urban security politics lends itself to old welfare state structures, even as responsibility for social crime prevention is devolved ‘downwards’ and distributed across and array of agencies. The social democratic legacy – the revised welfare state – seems to offer favorable conditions for plural policing of minority groups in the city.

Randi Gressgård is professor at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), and affiliated with the research unit International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER), University of Bergen. Her research interests include migration & minority studies, gender & sexuality studies and urban studies. Among her recent publications are Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010/2012) and ‘The power of (re)attachment in urban strategy: Interrogating the framing of social sustainability in Malmö’ (Environment and Planning A 2014, vol. 46).

Lisa Kings: Contesting urban management regimes: The rise of urban justice movements in Sweden

Addressing segregation, racism and welfare transformation, a new form of grassroots mobilization among young adults is emerging in the peripheries of Swedish cities. The common denominator is that they define themselves as urban justice movements– with place as the social ground for mobilization. Witha Gramscian perspective, the article analysis the rise of urban justice movements in relation to contemporary urban policies in Sweden. We argue that Swedish urban policies during the last 20 years have created a hegemonic urban management regime underpinned by area based programs with a focus on network steering and new forms of partnership between civil society and public institutions. The emergence of urban justice movements is here understood in relation to firsthand negative experience of– and later active revulsion from– having participated in activities and issues related to the urban management regime. These experiences and the later proclaimed autonomy of the movements have been a key condition for the beginning of a broader struggle that merges local rootedness with wider structural-institutional conditionality. (co-authored by Aleksandra Ålund (Linköping University) and Nazem Tahvilzadeh (KTH Royal Institute of Technology).

LISA KINGS holds a PhD in Sociology at Søderthorn University College. Her researh interests are urban theory, social movements, inequality and everyday life.  (lisa.kings@sh.se)

Vanja Lozic: Problematizing parents, governing troubled youth

The paperfocuses on current debate on troubled youth, living in socio-economically deprived suburbs in Sweden, and particularly discourses on problems of alienation, crime, arson and anti-social behaviour among youth. In the paper, interviews with the representatives of different organisations involved in managing the youth problem are analysed. One recurring theme in the interviews is problem discourses representing the parent as a problem. Departing from Foucault´s understanding of governmentality and the formation of subjectivity, we analyse the construction of problems, problematization, and conceivable solutions, as depicted by the interviewees. The problematizations recurring in the interviews are the deficiency of urban space, dysfunctional family relations and parents as being passive and culturally different. On the basis of such problematizations the interviewees propose solutions in various ways fostering the parents to become responsible and active subjects, who have internalised current norms and values. Other central solutions emerging in the interviews are the development of various forms of communicative skills as well as a range of pre-emptive measures targeting the parents. An important conclusion in the paper is that this way of developing possible solutions to the problems of suburban youth tends to focus on the transformation of individual parents, while structural dimensions get out of focus. What appears is a desire to foster parents and thus to produce a certain kind of subject, namely an active, responsible and cooperative individual, involved in the local community. (The paper is co-authored with Magnus Dahlstedt.)

Vanja Lozic holds a PhD in history and issenior lecturer in Science of Education at Kristianstad University, Sweden. His research deals with issues in education from the perspectives of ethnicity, multiculturalism, gender, disability, youth cultures and work integrated learning. At present, he is participating in a research project “Cooperation, education and inclusion in multi-ethnic urban settings”, which concerns the connections between institutional restructuring, youth resistance and strategies for social inclusion. The aim is to investigate the measures for social inclusion within schools, local institutions and civil society actors in socioeconomically deprived areas of large cities in Sweden

Sara Kohne: The experience of change in culturally diverse urban areas. Examples from two districts in Berlin and Oslo.

During the last two decades, central inner city areas have constantly become more attractive to the middle class as places for living and leisure. It is especially because of their history and cultural diversity that these urban districts gain ”new” popularity. This development is, among other things, connected to larger processes of economic and societal change, such as globalisation and de-industrialisation, and it is often called gentrification – a process of urban transformation that results in the physical, sociocultural and economic upgrading of city districts.

In taking a qualitative oriented approach on two culturally diverse urban areas that are partly experiencing the process which has just been described, Kohne´s aim is to identify challenges and assets that are experienced by the residents living and working in such districts.

In her presentation, Kohne will present selected findings from her work with the areas Kreuzberg SO36 in Berlin and Grønland-Tøyen in Oslo. She will discuss them in a comparative context.

Sara Kohne is a PhD candidate in the discipline of Cultural Studies at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen. Her research interests lie within the areas of cultural understandings of place, processes of change, and inequality in urban contexts.

Echoes of race in Amsterdam

In this talk, I will discuss how racialized discourses on multicultural failure and the trouble with the children of migrants is taken up and contested in multicultural Amsterdam. Like in other Western European countries, multiculturalism backlash discourses have dominated public debates in the Netherlands since the 1990s. I ask how people who are framed as part of the problem engage the moral imperatives of such backlash discourses and the anxieties they broadcast. Amsterdam’s Diamantbuurt provides a good vantage point for such an exploration since the neighbourhoods’ unruly Moroccan-Dutch young men have played an important role in Dutch backlash discourses. How do Moroccan-Dutch Diamantbuurt residents, who are closely identified with these iconic bad guys, negotiate the dominant narrative regarding their neighbourhood? This article demonstrates that for these residents, the anxieties articulated in backlash discourses become the grounds for an anxious grappling with abjectness and identification.

Anouk de Koning is assistant professor in Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is the author of Global Dreams: Class, Gender and Public Space in Cosmopolitan Cairo (AUC Press, 2009) and, with Rivke Jaffe, Introducing Urban Anthropology (Routledge, 2016).

A light lunch will be served

CANCELED  More infoermation about eventual repacements will be available sook

Predatory security: Reshaping the city and the state in Mozambique

Notions and practices of security colonise both state and urban contexts across Africa. Arguably, these notions and practices are also integral to wider global political formations where urban formations in Africa are often cast as pre-figuring the shape of future global cities more generally. Based on fieldworks in the Mozambican cities of Maputo and Chimoio, this paper sees security there as related to violent crime and capital accumulation in ways that undermine policy-oriented representations of security provision as solely undertaken by state police supplemented by neoliberal assemblages of security firms. Rather, and more specifically, the paper shows how security is not only subjected to a spatialized logic of race and social control but also renders violence – in all its forms – central to its exercise and cosmologies. This point will be emphasised by analysing how various forms of policing must be understood beyond the security-development nexus. These forms of policing increasingly involve a gradual emergence of what I call ‘predatory security’ that is central to violent modes of capital accumulation that shape African urban landscapes as well as define the contours of the state. The paper suggests that as a configuration of accumulative violence such predatory security has consequences for how we should approach calls for rights to the city as well as the state in urban African orders and beyond.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, associate professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, has researched issues such as state formation, violence, poverty and rural-urban connections in Mozambique since 1998. Bertelsen has published extensively internationally and is publishing the monograph Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture and Power in Mozambique (Berghahn Books, 2016) and has co-edited the anthologies Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval (with Bruce Kapferer, Berghahn Books, [2009] 2012) and Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, ca. 1850 to 1950 (with Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland, Berghahn Books, 2015).