Guest Speakers and Participants

Dagmawi Yimer was born and raised in Addis Ababa, and now lives in Verona. He left Ethiopia after the unrest surrounding the elections in 2005, in which hundreds of young people were taken to jail and killed. After a traumatic journey through the Libyan Desert and a perilous crossing across the Mediterranean in late July 2006, he landed on the island of Lampedusa. He remained in Italy and took part in a 2007 film workshop. Together with five other immigrants, he made his first film in Rome, IL DESERTO E IL MARE. Since then, he has made several other short films and documentaries on the situation of migrants and racism in Italy, as well as the victims on the EU’s southernmost borders. Since it is such an exception to the rule that refugees self-document their stories, no less than three films by Dagmawi Yimer are being screened in Cologne: The autobiographical reconstruction of his escape route in LIKE A MAN ON EARTH, his documentary VA PENSIERO about racist attacks in Italy, and his 2015 cinematic tribute to the refugees who perished at sea before reaching Lampedusa, ASMAT – NAMES IN MEMORY OF ALL VICTIMS OF THE SEA. The latter was produced by “Archivio delle Memorie Migranti”, which is dedicated to documenting the history and stories of migrants in Italy through photography, film and video.

Sylvain George was born in 1968 in Lyon, France. He holds degrees in Philosophy, Law and Political Sciences, and Cinema (EHESS Sorbonne). Since 2006 he has produced and directed documentary films on the themes of immigration and social movements. His films include The Impossible – Pieces of Fury (2009); May They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War I) (2010) ; The Outbursts (My Mouth, My Revolt, My Name)​ (2012); Vers Madrid - The Burning Bright (2013); Paris Est Une Fête - Un Film en 18 Vagues (2017); Obscure Nights - Wild Leaves (2022); and Obscure Nights - Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023), the latter of which received the special mention at the Locarno International Film Festival. He has collaborated with many engaged artists and musicians including Archie Shepp, William Parker, Valérie Dréville, Okkyung Lee, John Edwards, Sylvain Luc, Serge Teyssot-Gay and Nicolas Crosse. He teaches at the Institut de Sciences Politiques de Paris (IEP), and has given masterclasses and workshops all over the world (FEMIS, Punto de Vista, Instituto Politécnico de Tomar, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon), Lima Independente Film Festival, Filmmaker Film Festival/Milano Film Festival, FIDBA, MIDBO, FICCALI, DockFest, LOCARNO…). Of his films he says, “I make the films I want to see, films that I feel are an emergency; they are necessary.

Christina Varvia is an architect and the research coordinator for Forensic Architecture. She graduated from the AA School of Architecture with a previous degree from Westminster University. Her previous research includes studies on digital media and memory as well as the perception of the physical environment through scanning and imaging technologies, research that she deploys through time-based media. After having worked in architectural practice, Christina joined the Forensic Architecture team in 2014, where she developed methodologies and undertook video analysis that lead to the Rafah: Black Friday report, unpacking one day of war in Gaza, 2014.  She has since coordinated the Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian torture prison project, FA’s Venice Biennale participation, as well as many other exhibitions and projects.

Lyndsey Stonebridge was born in Bromley, Kent. She is an English scholar and professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham. Her work relates to refugee studies, human rights, and the effects of violence on the mind in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is also a regular radio and media commentator, writing for publications such as The New Statesman, Prospect Magazine, and New Humanist. Her latest books are Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018) and The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), Winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Her other books include: The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (with John Phillips, 1998), The Writing of Anxiety (2007) and British Fiction after Modernism (with Marina MacKay, 2007). She is currently working on a large interdisciplinary project on refugee host communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey and writing a short literary history of human rights, Writing and Right: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She is a co-editor of Refugee History of OUP’s Mid-Century series.

Layal Ftouni, is an assistant professor in gender studies and critical theory at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the recipient of the Dutch Research Council Veni grant (2021–25) for the research project entitled “Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival.” The monograph explores the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death (both human and environmental) in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Syria and Palestine. She works across the fields/areas of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, political theory, critical theory, and critical race studies. 

Robert Franklin Barsky is Canada Research Chair in Law, Narrative, and Border Crossing. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and Associate Faculty in the School of Law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is an expert on Noam Chomsky, literary theory, convention refugees, immigration and refugee law, borders, work through the Americas, and Montreal. His biography of Chomsky titled Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent was published in 1997 by MIT Press, followed in 2007 by The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, and in 2011 by a biography of Chomsky's teacher: Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism. His most recent books are Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law (Routledge Law, 2016) and Hatched!, a novel (Sunbury Press, 2016).

Leti Volpp is Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Center for Race and Gender at University of California Berkeley Boalt School of Law. Volpp, is scholar of both law and the humanities, writes about citizenship, migration, culture and identity. Her most recent publications include “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change” in Critical Analysis of Law(2016), “The Indigenous As Alien” in the UC Irvine Law Review (2015), “Saving Muslim Women” in Public Books (2015), “Civility and the Undocumented Alien” in Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014), “The Boston Bombers” in Fordham Law Review (2014), “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011). She is the editor of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002),“Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review(2001), and many other articles.

Cathy Park Hong a is Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science in the Department of English. Hong is a writer and poet who has published three volumes of poetry, including Translating Mo'um, Dance Dance Revolution, and Engine Empire. Her creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings (2020) was both a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She was also named on Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list, as well as a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Hong grew up in Los Angeles before earning her B.A. from Oberlin College and MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Prior to coming to UC Berkeley, she was on the faculty at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program for poetry.

T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and his essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and catalogues worldwide. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions.

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/performance artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on racial formations, feminist theory, black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. She is a social anthropologist and author To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. She is currently developing a new project on the racial politics of energy production and dispossession in the US Gulf South and South Africa. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix. 

Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; racialization in relation to labour and technology; the visual and sensory culture of digital media; debates on form and aesthetics across theories of anti-colonialism and race; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment.

He is currently at work on a book project entitled Wondrous Nights: Global Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. Through a global range of nocturnal films, this project looks at the relationship between technologically-mediated perception and the affective and sensory dimensions of the historical present. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023).

Cortez was previously Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and English at Vanderbilt University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Department at Swarthmore College. He has also curated exhibitions and film series at The Slought Foundation, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Penn Humanities Forum and The Lightbox Center.

Professor Göktürk earned her Dr.phil. at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and department chair.

She has held awards and grants from the DAAD, the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, the Institute for European Studies, the Institute for International Studies, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Digital Humanities at Berkeley. She has been an invited fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz and the Center for Cinepoetics at the Freie Universität Berlin

On campus, she holds affiliations with the Department of Film and Media, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Digital Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. She has participated in cross-campus collaborations on “Cultural Forms in Transit” and a strategic working group on “Circulation.” She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the electronic journal launched by the Berkeley German Department in September 2005, and coordinator of the Multicultural Germany Project.

Stephanie L. Canizales, PhD, is a researcher, author, and professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Southern California (2018).

Stephanie specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American-origin immigrants and their descendants in the United States. Over the last decade, Stephanie has focused her work on the migration and coming-of-age of unaccompanied children from Central America and Mexico in California and Texas. Throughout her research and writing, Stephanie explores the role of immigration policy in shaping the everyday lives of migrant children and their families, how immigrants and the communities they arrive to (re)make one another mutually, and immigrants’ articulations of success and well-being within an increasingly unequal US society. Stephanie’s first book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, takes on many of these issues.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in Los Angeles motivate her commitment to public scholarship. Stephanie’s research has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. She also uses her expertise to inform policy through her work as U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Resident Scholar and a UNICEF USA Research Consultant.