Amsterdam, the Netherlands
July 2, 2018
The recent movement of people from one place to another due to precarious circumstances furnishes a decisive, contemporary subject for inquiry. Arguers assemble and move themselves and things about within cities and across countries via material and immaterial networks. Identities are mixed. Status split. Pro and con arguments work amid situations where the roles of hospitality, exchange, and collaboration mix and meet restrictions, group disconnections, and resistance. What are the stances, schemes, and genre of rescuers, smugglers, camp-life, border life, and residential enclaves? What are the dialogical capacities, apparatus, and ties of migrants, refugees, diasporatic groups, displaced persons, specious document holders, extended visa holders, temporary workers, and students? After what scholars call the mobility turn, the history of movement provides new language to understand the ambit of everyday, informal reasoning, as the new “normal”: exile, exodus, migration, expatriation, place-less-ness, multiple identities, and anonymity often without the option of returning “home.”
RAIL 