RSC Public Seminar, 5pm, Wednesday 29 May: ‘Sonopolis: Sound, citizenship, and migrant activisms in Athens’

RSC Public seminar 5pm Wednesday 29 May on Sonopolis: Sound, citizenship, and migrant activisms in Athens with Dr Tom Western (Refugee Studies Centre).

Seminar Room 1, Oxford Department of International Development,

3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB

Seminar series: Everyday Resistance to the European Governance of Migration

Series convenor: Dr Cory Rodgers

About the seminar

At protest marches in Athens, where people gather to voice dissent at the violence of asylum regimes, the chants have shifted from ‘Open the Borders’ to ‘Open the City’. Border struggles become urban struggles. Athens once again becomes a polis – a centre of political action – and people use sound to make claims on belonging at street level. This paper does two things. First, it listens to these migrant activisms, focussing on sound as a way of understanding citizenship – of hearing inclusion and exclusion. The city is a testing ground (or maybe dumping ground) for European experiments in border management, but is also a sounding board for solidarity, a resonance chamber for resistance. Second, it reports on a collaborative sound recording project, working with refugee-led organisations and people who resist refugeeness. Together we run workshops on the city and citizenship, using sound as a heuristic and a catalyst for narration: opening creative engagements with representing displacement; and distorting the dominant tropes of ‘European refugee crisis’. We focus on everyday sensory experiences and performances of citizenship in protracted displacement. In the sonopolis, vocabularies of integration are reclaimed, disrupting the moral authority of NGOs to speak on behalf of those who have crossed borders. In the sonopolis, migrant activisms open ways of rethinking citizenship altogether.

Registration not required. Light refreshments will be provided after the event.