Imagining Borders, Race and Labor in Times of Crises: The Case of Europe

29 September 2023
10:00 - 13:30
Istanbul Policy Center

The panel “Imagining Borders, Race and Labor in Times of Crises: The Case of Europe,” organized by Asst. Prof. Sibel Karadağ (2021/22 Mercator-IPC Fellow) from KHAS Political Science and Public Administration department will take place on Friday, September 29th between 10:00-13:30 at Istanbul Policy Center in Karaköy.

Martina Tazzioli from the University of Bologna, Nando Sigona from the University of Birmingham, and Itamar Mann from the University of Haifa will be the panel speakers.

About the Panel

The aim of this panel is to critically interrogate the intersectional nature of b/orders, mobility, racial categories, and labor in Europe. The 21st century will continue to be the age of migration for various reasons such as protracted wars, conflicts, human rights violations, climate change, disasters, drought, poverty, and new forms of slavery. Seas turning into graveyards, floating carceral spaces, chains of deportations, migrant bodies trapped in wildfires, lethal border technologies, and thousands living in refugee camps have become routine sights and policies of this century. How can we conceptualize today’s border regimes with regard to the production of racial hierarchies and labor subordination?

The physical barricading and ever more lethal policing of borders signify an abundantly racialized landscape. Rather than perceiving the racial (post)coloniality of borders as a merely “exclusionary” practice, it is vital to see that border and mobility regimes concomitantly reproduce illegalized and disposable labor-power, namely the racially subjugated migrant working class.

The panel aims to bring together distinguished scholars on the subject and to generate interdisciplinary dialogue among academics, researchers, practitioners, activists, critical thinkers, and all other stakeholders. The panel will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, as the country currently hosts the world’s largest refugee population under a wide spectrum of temporalities while working in cooperation with the EU’s and the UK’s offshoring border policies. In this regard, during the panel discussion, a wide range of issues such as the border policies of the EU/UK, border governance in the Mediterranean and the Aegean, policies of externalization and deportation, and contemporary border governance in connection with coloniality and rising “neo-fascism” will be touched upon

Program
10:00-10:15   Welcoming remarks / Sibel Karadağ
10:15-12:00   Martina Tazzioli, University of Bologna
Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham
Itamar Mann, University of Haifa
12:00-12:15   Coffee Break
12:15-13:30   Discussion

About the Speakers

Martina Tazzioli is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Bologna. She is the author of “Border abolitionism: migration containment and the genealogies of struggles” (2023). The Making of Migration. The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders (2019), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016). She is co-editor in chief of Politics Journal and on the editorial board of Political Geography- Open Research and of Radical Philosophy.

Nando Sigona is professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham, UK. Nando is a founding editor of the peer reviewed journal Migration Studies (Oxford University Press) and lead editor for Global Migration and Social Change book series by Bristol University Press. His work has appeared in a range of international academic journals, including Sociology, Social Anthropology, Antipode, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Identities, Citizenship Studies, International Migration Review and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is author or editor of books and journal’s special issues including Becoming Adult on the Move (with Chase and Chatty, 2023), The Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity (with Meisnner and Vertovec, 2022) Undocumented Migration (with Gonzales, Franco and Papoutsi, 2019); Unravelling Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ (with Crawley, Duvell, Jones, and McMahon, 2017), Within and beyond citizenship (with Roberto G. Gonzales, 2017), The Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (with Fiddian Qasmiyeh, Loescher and Long, 2014), and Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants (with Bloch and Zetter, 2014).

Itamar Mann is an Associate Professor at the University of Haifa, Faculty of Law, where he teaches and does research in the areas of public international law, political theory, human rights, migration and refugee law, and environmental law. Since the summer of 2021, he is the president of Border Forensics. Itamar has published in leading journals and edited volumes, and his monograph, Humanity at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law, came out with Cambridge University Press in 2016. Alongside his academic work, he is a legal adviser at GLAN (Global Legal Action Network), where he advances strategic human rights litigation. Before moving to Haifa, Mann was a fellow at Georgetown Law Center, Washington DC. He holds an LLB (Tel Aviv University), LLM, and JSD degrees (Yale Law School). Itamar’s recent scholarship has focused on law and oceans and seas. In particular, on rescue vessels, both seaborne and airborne, with a recent project on how Greece has employed rescue equipment in a cruel practice of abandoning asylum seekers in the Aegean sea.

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