Lecture by Alison Phipps (University of Glasgow) at the Global Tipping Points and the Role of Research: European Union and Asia-Pacific Migration Summit, UniSA, Hawke EU Centre, Adelaide, 1-2 November 2016

1. ‘We Refugees’: Hardening and
Softening of the borders of everyday
life.
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. Yesterday’s Story

10. A life time ban
on all who
arrive by boat.
On all who have
the gall
to make a ‘dangerous
journey’ towards
Protection.

11. Another Story
Of the hardening
Of the hardest
of
borders

12. Islamic University Gaza

13. Borders of Finance
Dear TEMPUS (partners)
We are emailing you in reference to Project
517494-TEMPUS-UK-JPMES (2011-2504). We
have been asked by the European Commission to
provide documentation in regards to costs that
have been reported in the financial claim.
You may have already provided documentation
for these transactions however, the Commission
is asking you to provide these again, and if any
documents are in Arabic, they must be translated
into English so we can understand the content.

14. That morning

16. On that same day

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

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

19. An Academic Border Guard

20. 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?

21. 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).

22. ‘Optimistic’ Refugees
Apparently no one wants to
know that contemporary
history has created a new
kind of human beings – the
kind that are put in
concentration camps by
their foes and internment
camps by their friends.
(p111)

23. 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.

24. 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)

25. 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)

26. 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.”

27. Porosity & Perforation
“Mental life doesn’t so
constrain us. It is porous,
open to the air and light.”
(Scarry, 2003, 34)

28. 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

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

30. What are we learning?
“The new world is not given
whole, any more than the
new self is given abruptly in
psychotherapy. It is given
only a little at a time, one
poem, one healing one
pronouncement, one
promise, one
commandment.”
(Brueggemann)

31. 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.

32. Witness-bearing: Grand Synthe

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

34. Saumoud: Perforations
• https://www.youtube.c
om/watch?v=NnxZ_tW
POT0

35. Noyam - Broken World, Broken Word

36. 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)

37. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

38. Decisions based on ‘Research Evidence’

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

40. ‘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)