20. Doing violence to place: political
transformation and the re-making of home
Convenors:
Stef Jansen,
University of Hull
Staffan
Löfving, University of Stockholm
Discussants:
Andy
Dawson, University of Melbourne / Hull
Fiona Ross,
University of Cape Town
This session investigates how displaced people engage
(or don't) with the various places they inhabit during their lives, bringing
together two critical concerns—the experience of violence and that of
place. In particular, it questions two central assumptions underlying much
anthropological and other writing on displacement.
(a) Questioning
the sedentarist presumption of a universal desire to return home amongst
displaced people, we call for an ethnographically informed critique of both 'return'
and 'home'.
(b) Questioning
the unidimensional emphasis on displacement itself as the key form of change in
the lives of displaced people, we wish to highlight the importance of economic
and political transformations occurring in the context left behind and of
developments within displaced life trajectories themselves.
This session, then, seeks to explore contested
experiences of place amongst people displaced due to various forms and degrees
of violence. In addressing the issues above, we also aim to critically
investigate dominant approaches to the reasons for displacement, which enforce
an absolute (moral) dividing line between the experience of military violence
and other forms of inequality and suffering. Instead we encourage sensitivity
to issues of despair, fear, indignation and hope, undermining such comfortable
dichotomies and highlighting the positionings of displaced people as both
victims and aGhents.
‘Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’. Home, displacement and return as
contested issues in the case of Elian Gonzalez
Mona Rosendahl,
University of Stockholm
Home and Away: The Divided Lives of Mozambican
Refugees in South Africa’s Lowveld Region
Coping with
Displacement and Making Multiple Places. The Case of Nida (Nidden), past and
present Curonian Spit (Lithuania/East Prussia)
Anja Peleikis, Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale
Conflict in
migration: Romanians, Moroccans and racism in Spain
Swanie
Potot, University of Nice
Sophia Antipolis
Working at Home:
Palestinian Refugees, Israeli Settlements and the Violence of Legal Boundaries
Toby Kelly,
University of Oxford
Poverty,
Displacement, and Political Violence in Contemporary Bolivia
Lesley Gill,
American University
Place and
Identity among Guatemalan Returnees
Kristi Anne
Stølen, University of Oslo
What changed and
what remained the same? Contradictions of protracted exile for some Greek
Cypriot IDPs
Peter Loizos,
London School of Economics and Political Science