Governing the Displaced in Global Capitalism: Refugee survival from the camp to the city
Dr Ali Bhagat (Saint Mary’s University, Canada, and University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
Wednesday, 02 March 2022, 5pm to 6.30pm
via Zoom
Hosted by Refugee Studies Centre
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2022
Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility
Series convenor: Dr Hanno Brankamp, Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration
This seminar series critically interrogates the ways in which militarised borders, migration enforcement, and their racial orderings continue to be normalised on a global scale. The political drive towards expanding walls, policing infrastructures, camps, detention centres, interceptions at sea, push backs, deportations, surveillance, and racist immigration policies that restrict asylum and migration is hereby not only a legacy of past empires but is also indicative of new emerging geographies of (im)mobility, racialisation, and liberal violence. Speakers in this series come from a range of disciplines and will examine global migration through questions of race and racism, coloniality, nationalism, citizenship, belonging, criminalisation, and bordering.
Series poster (pdf)
About the seminar
This talk aims to centre refugee survival in global capitalism between the camp and the city. Drawing on fieldwork data from Paris and Nairobi between 2017-2019, I examine refugee survival on three prongs: shelter, income, and political belonging. With the ever-increasing presence of refugees in major urban centres due to the dismantling of certain camps, trafficking, economically motivated migration and other conflict-related causes, the interconnections between camps and cities like Paris and Nairobi have become more apparent in recent years. In placing refugees in global capitalism, I argue that refugees comprise a disposable population in the global economy along the lines of Kanyal Sanyal and Gargi Bhattacharya’s conception of the ‘edge’. With this in mind, I speak to the material and ideological dimensions of disposability and pay attention to the urban dimensions of racial exclusion amidst logics of capital accumulation.
Video
The video of this seminar is available to watch on YouTube.