Troubling Borders and Melancholic Subjectivity: European Welcome Culture in the ‘Order of the Border’ with Dr. Marie Sandberg
Friday, November 19, 20212:00 – 3:15pmLocation: Place of Many Trees (formerly Liu Multipurpose Room), Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia, 6476 NW Marine Drive, V6T 1Z2. For directions and parking, see here.Free & open to the public. In-person attendance will be limited to comply with BC Public Health Regulations.
Co-sponsored by the UBC Centre for Migration Studies Borders Group
Marie Sandberg, Associate Professor, Director of the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS), University of Copenhagen, sandberg@hum.ku.dk
[Abstract]
In this talk, I will examine the border as a site of tension and a productive space for change. Based on recent ethnographic research on volunteers’ welcome practices in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands during the 2015 refugee arrivals to Europe, I argue that these practices were at once de/stabilizing state borders: While providing for the newly arrived at train stations, in storage places, and on city squares, the welcome practices were contesting the border as barrier. At the same time chaos was organised into daily routines, hence the volunteers were stepping in for state authorities, when they refrained from action. In this process, the border emerges as an ambivalent sphere, in which the “order of the border” (Hage 2003) can be disturbed or troubled. With inspiration from Judith Butlers’s work on “melancholic subjectivity” (1997, 2004), I will further discuss how the refugee relief practices released a paradoxical longing for an ungrievable loss of the sociality presupposed by crisis, after the spectacle of ‘the European refugee crisis’ had moved elsewhere. In conclusion, it is suggested that these border tensions and the melancholia of volunteering exposes Europe as a troubled topos for civic participation.
[Bio]
Marie Sandberg is Associate Professor in European Ethnology and Director of the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) at the University of Copenhagen. This fall she is a visiting researcher at the UBC Migration Center. She has published several peer-reviewed articles in high-ranked journals such as Journal of European Studies, Nordic Journal of Migration Research and Identities. Upcoming is an edited volume on Research Methodologies and Ethical Challenges in Digital Migration Research (with Palgrave Macmillan). Marie Sandberg’s ethnographic research expertise focuses on European borders, migration practices and everyday life Europeanisation. She studies how borders in/of everyday life are continuously negotiated, overcome, and rebuilt in interactions such as volunteer work in support of refugees coming to Europe during the 2015 “refugee crisis.”
