Discussants: Prof. Manuela Bojadžijev (Humboldt University/Leuphana University) Prof. Nicholas De Genova (University Houston), Prof. Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University)
“The coloniality of asylum. Mobility, autonomy and solidarity in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis”
Through the main concepts of ‘the coloniality of asylum’ and ‘solidarity as method’, this book links the question of the state to the one of civil society; in so doing, it questions the idea of ‘autonomous politics’, showing how both refugee mobility and solidarity are intimately marked by the coloniality of asylum, in its multiple ramifications of objectification, racialisation and victimisation.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg in the wake of the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’, this book offers a polyphonic account, moving between the standpoints of different subjects and wrestling with questions of protection, freedom, autonomy, solidarity and subjectivity. It shows how ‘Europe’ politically, legally and socially produces ‘refugees’ while, in turn, through their border struggles and autonomous movements, ‘refugees’ produce the space of ‘Europe’.
Author: Fiorenza Picozza (UNAM) is a researcher and activist who has been involved in refugee solidarity for over a decade. She has an interdisciplinary background, holding a PhD in Geography from King’s College London (2019), an MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies from SOAS University of London (2014), and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Rome La Sapienza (2009). Her research interests concern borders, asylum, migration, race, coloniality, humanitarianism, and solidarity. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Geography of the UNAM in Mexico City, where she is working on a project on asylum, racialisation and humanitarian borders in Mexico.
Event organised with the support of the Department of Poltiics & International Relations, Goldsmiths
for info: Martina.Tazzioli@gold.ac.uk