Public lecture by Prof Alison Phipps (UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts, University of Glasgow) at the Political Science and International Relations Programme of Victoria University of Wellington, in association with the European Union Centres Network and the University of South Australia, 7 November 2016

1. Recent Refugee Flows in Europe:
Challenges and Responses
Alison Phipps
University of Glasgow

2. Gifts are in the Feet

3. The Epic Story
Of the hardening of borders
against kith and kin
And the softening of borders
of skin.

4. Conditional Hospitality: FRONTEX and
the Mediterranean (The Guardian)

5. Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? … in that
gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is
History.
(Derek Walcott )

6. Calais

7. States of Exception

8. ‘They create a wasteland and call it peace.’

9. We have been here before.
And here we are again.

10. We are all border guards now
Health Care
Education
Housing
Employment
Banking

11. An Academic Border Guard

12. Where to go?
And to whom;
To think anew the questions
We are posed
By all those
Asking “Where to, when no one will have us?

13. We Refugees: Arendt (1943)
“The concomity of the
European peoples went to
pieces, when, and
because, it allowed its
weakest member to be
excluded and persecuted.”
(Arendt: p119).

14. Sacred – in the original sense of ‘destined to die’
“Refugees driven from
country to country
represent the vanguard of
their peoples – if they keep
their identity.” (p.112)
On ne parvient pas deux
fois.

15. Agamben: on ‘We Refugees’
If in the system of the
nation-state the refugee
represents such a
disquieting element, it is
above all because […] the
refugee throws into crisis
the original fiction of
sovereignty.
(p.117)

16. The Dominant Scripts
“The script is of therapeutic,
technocratic, consumer militarism.
[Of Rights and Subjects, Sovereignty
and Citizenship.]
And that script has failed.
It cannot make us safe
And it cannot make us happy.”
(Brueggemann)

17. Citizen’s ‘being-in-exodus’
“It is only in a land where
the spaces of state will have
been perforated and
topologically deformed, and
the citizen will have learned
to acknowledge the refugee
that he [sic] himself is, that
man’s political survival today
will be imaginable.”

18. The offer of a Counter-story
People don’t change much through
doctrine or argument or sheer cognitive
appeal.
People don’t change much because of
moral appeal – or at least not these days.
Offer of other models or old stories half
forgotten, echoes from other peoples
and places, tracings. (Brueggemann)
Invitation to a counter-story

19. “We Refugees” - a softening
2 ‘puncturing’ events
(Badiou).
The change of heart by a
politician and a country.
Aylan Kurdi image

20. Perforations: Imagining Inclusive Nationalism
“You have honoured us by
making Scotland your
home.”
FM Sturgeon
“When people say to me
‘why don’t we take care of
our own’ I say – they are
our own. This is their
home.”
Minister for Europe:
Yousaf.

21. Witness-bearing: Grand Synthe

22. Arts of Softening and Deterritorializing
Multimodal, multilingual Creative
Interventions and Interruptions
(translingual practice).
Curation of films, workshops,
methods, poetry, drama,
devising.

23. Sharing the World:
“Meeting a stranger outside
of our own boundaries is
rather easy, and even satisfies
our aspirations, as long as we
can return home and
appropriate between
ourselves what we have in
this way discovered.
To be forced to limit and
change our home, or our way
of being at home, is much
more difficult.” (Irigarary)

24. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

25. Decisions based on ‘Research Evidence’

26. “Revolution happens because
everyone refused to go home” (Butler)

27. ‘Harsh and Exciting’
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert,
repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.” (Mary Oliver)