Bordered Life and the Right to Move
April 25 - 26, 2025
Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
UC Berkeley
Bordered Life and the Right to Move is an international conference that brings together artists, activists, and scholars who examine borders, race, and migration today in the United States, Europe, and across the globe. We will be joined by filmmakers Dagmawi Yimer and Sylvain George. Speakers include Robert Barsky (French & Law, Vanderbilt University), T.J. Demos (History of Art & Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz), Layal Ftouni (Gender Studies and Critical Theory, Utrecht University), poet Cathy Park Hong (English, UC Berkeley), Lyndsey Stonebridge (English, Humanities and Human Rights, University of Birmingham), Christina Varvia (Visual Culture, Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London), and Leti Volpp (Law, UC Berkeley). A roundtable on the contemporary border regime will feature UC Berkeley faculty Courtney Desiree Morris (Gender and Women’s Studies), Stephanie Canizales (Sociology), Iggy Cortez (Film & Media), and Deniz Göktürk (German).
Questions that we will address over this two-day conversation include:
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The conversion of an ongoing border struggle into a punctual, apolitical event designated as “crisis.”
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How borders are felt and sensed by those who seek to cross them.
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The entangled histories and memories of race and colonialism at contemporary borders and their technologies.
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How testimonies by migrants and their cultural representations resist border violence, historicize the refugee “crisis,” and forge new modes of becoming or belonging.
For more information and full conference program, please visit this link.
Presented by the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry
Co-sponsored by the Institute for European Studies, the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence, Center for Race and Gender, and the European Union.
For accessibility related inquiries, please contact info.cici@berkeley.edu.