The recent surge in migration and the current global advance of fascism gives historical urgency to considering migrant grassroots initiatives that negotiate cultural differences under duress. With growing numbers of migrants confined to detention centers or refugee camps and the rise of a new sanctuary movement, a poetics of containment (enforced by the state and the market) as well as excess (from resistant practices) guides our thinking. This workgroup explores how displaced populations imagine and enact alternative modes of belonging that resist the state and its embrace of free market ideology. We seek to understand how everyday activism, intimate encounters, and place-making strategies emerging from this tension between mobility and confinement engender possibilities for organized forms of resistance and solidarity outside the bounds of formal citizenship. We encourage applications that consider or expand on the following questions:
In what ways is the performance event a radical encounter between performer(s) and spectator(s) that creates moments of intimacy that enact or imagine new ways of relating, looking beyond a politics of inclusion?
How might performance bridge the gap between radical emancipatory ideologies and everyday sustained actions and commitments?
How do displaced populations mobilize aesthetic practices to shape the construction of affordable, equitable, and liveable urban spaces?
How are notions of (neo)liberal frameworks of citizenship and belonging resisted, contested, and transformed by displaced populations? What are some of the emerging, alternative, precarious ways of articulating citizenship and belonging within and against these (neo)liberal frameworks?
How might migrant practices unsettle binary formations foundational to the nation-state: inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, citizen/noncitizen?
How are such practices drawing on converging histories and present realities to enact possible futures within and beyond the state?