Bordered Life and the Right to Move is part of an ongoing initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry to bring together artists, scholars and activists who are preoccupied with borders, race and migration, particularly at this moment, in the US and globally. This year, our international speakers include filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer, documentary filmmaker and poet Sylvain George, Christina Varvia from Forensic Architecture, Arendt, human rights scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge, and gender studies scholar Layal Ftouni. Closer to home, we will hear from law and literature scholar Robert Barsky, scholar of immigration and citizenship law Leti Volpp, poet and writerCathyParkHong, as well as art historian and cultural critic T.J. Demos.
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.
Graduate students from across the Berkeley campus will introduce and moderate the panels, and a roundtable will gather UC Berkeley colleagues from different fields to address the contemporary border regime.