The Body Politic

This sphere is concerned with the politics of belonging, and will examine how categories, practices and experiences of belonging intersect with mobilities. Contributions to this sphere may address (but are not restricted to) the following topics: Developing understandings of belonging as uneven, changing, distributed and/or hierarchized; Considering the intersections between social class, social mobility, inequality and belonging; Examining the ways in which histories of colonialism and empire, and practices of migration and forced movement, shape experiences of belonging; Tracking how legal categories of belonging (such as citizenship) generate belongings, divisions and exclusions. Interrogating conflicts over belonging within local, national and international communities, including the weaponisation of nativism within nationalist politics; Documenting the ways in which radical political and/or local grassroots movements, nurture alternative forms of belonging that counter stigma, abjection and violence – for example, queer communities, refugee solidarity cities, and anti-poverty activism.

Sphere Curator: Jan Willem Duyvendak

Sessions, researchers and papers (in progress):

1. Construing and contesting (non)normativity in the politics of belonging and intimacy

• Saskia Bonjour and Susan Diepenmaat – Migration lawyers and the construction of the ‘strange’ family
• Eline Westra – Multiple Barriers to the Welfare State. Surinamese-Dutch Feminist Claims to Social Citizenship in the 1980s
• Sonja Evaldsson Mellström – “It has to be either or”: Sex Work and The Respectable Lesbian Asylum Seeker in France
• Mira Ducommun and Christin Achermann – Legal constructions of (non-)normativity in child placement decisions in Switzerland, 1960 to 1980

2. Race, citizenship, labour and memory in (post-) imperial Portugal

• Morgane Delaunay – Decolonisation, migrations, and Portuguese citizenship
• Bruno Góis – Immigrants, labour, and citizenship in post-colonial Portugal
• Jonas Prinzleve – Geographies of (un-)belonging: Post-colonial culture and public memory in Lisbon
• Elsa Peralta – Labor and Citizenship in late Portuguese Colonialism in Africa

3. Shifting paradigms, moving society. Anti-racism in the Netherlands

• Markus Balkenhol – The appearance of race. How to un/see race in a color blind society
• Aya Ezawa & Jasmijn Rana – ‘Ethnic’ identity and belonging in Dutch academia
• Vicky Pinheiro Keulers and Paul Mepschen – Connecting the first and second wave of antiracism in the Netherlands
• Zouhair Hammana – Refusing the University Machine

4. Europe and its Others

• Deniz Aktas – Whiteness Is Made Not Born: Turkish-Dutch and the Racial Grammar of Everyday Politics in the Netherlands
• Hannah Myott – Who counts as “the Other”? Mobile categories of belonging for refugees in Austria
• Petre Breazu & Aidan McCarry – Narratives of non-belonging on Social Media: The Case of European Roma
• Una Tanovic – Making Visible the Work of Translation in Post-Yugoslav Refugee Stories

5. Outsiders

• Hanan Elsayed – Politics and Scientificity: France and its “Foreigners”
• Florian Lippert – “Culture of cultures” or cultural rebordering? Dialectics of Belonging in current discourses on a “European culture”
• Anne Schult – Twentieth-Century Displacement and the Politics of “Uprootedness”
• Atinati Mamatsashvili – The Body of the Other: Portraying the Jew in the Public Space under Nazism in Literary Works (France, Belgium, Luxembourg)

6. Afterlives of colonalism, communism, genocide and empire

• Matthew Fenat – Voices from the Grassroots: Postmemory and Political Citizenship Repositioning of Survivors of the 1965-1966 Anti-Communist Mass Violence in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia
• Christian Jones – “Men of Three Worlds:” The Straits Chinese, Race and Belonging in British Malaya, c.1900-1950
• Abosede George – Romana’s Return and the Ambivalences of Belonging

7. Health, race, gendered belonging

• Feyda Sayan Cengiz – Therapeutic culture and lifestyle politics: New sources of belonging for Turkey’s secular middle class?
• Luca Follis, Nicola Burns – Health, Mobility Justice and the Politics of Belonging: Moving Beyond Sedentarist Paradigms
• Patricia Hamilton – Racial Matching in Assisted Reproduction
• Jamilla Hamidu – Ghanaian diaspora transnational political engagement in London: Identity politics of here and there.

8. Mobility (in)justice

• Janina Selzer – Learning to Fly while Staying Grounded: How Geographies of Inclusion and Exclusion Shape Pathways to Belonging for Refugees
• Felix Kram – Belonging and Migrant Labour in Freetown, 1885-1910
• Carolyn Pinedo Turnovsky – Un/Documenting Persons: Material Project of Identity and the State

9. Indian mobilities

• Sneha Annavarapu – Aesthetics of Authority: unruly motorists, friendly police, and the politics of visibility in urban India
• Kunal Shahdeo – Being, Becoming and Belonging: Politics of Indigeneity among the Adivasis of Jharkhand
• Sanam Sharief Khan – United Past, Divided Present, and Uncertain Future: A Study of the Sense of Belonging of Divided Families in Poonch District of Jammu and Kashmir