Abstract
The present investigation explores specific ways in which forced migration scholarship could bring about learning opportunities hand in hand with analyses of displacement and dispossession. The aim of the chapter is threefold. It proposes that a new ethics of witnessing as applied to the work of scholars of forced migration is to be construed as a form of responsibility; it sheds light on pedagogical/curricular interventions which could produce a targeted and radical-justice oriented form of scholarly engagement, especially in context of gender-specific historical trauma and widespread and state-sponsored or condoned violence; and, it provides a roadmap concerning how progressive pedagogies based on witnessing can motivate scholars and researchers to develop an articulate understanding of affect that could encourage transformative political responses and processes.
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Notes
- 1.
Silvey, Rachel. “Borders, embodiment, and mobility: Feminist migration studies in geography.” A companion to feminist geography (2005): 138–149.
- 2.
As a very good example of how to redefine disposession as a gendered process, see Caitlin Ryan, “Gendering Palestinian dispossession: Evaluating land loss in the West Bank.” Antipode 49, no. 2 (2017): 477–498. Ryan aptly argues that in the context of Palestinian territorial dispossession, the inadequate attention paid to how this process is heavily gendered leads to a failure of fully understanding its legitimizing discourses and practices. Specifically, gender-blind discussions on territorial dispossession entirely overlooks the power relations at play as well as the differential and societal impacts of these waves of dispossession. I use a similar lens for discussing the essentially gendered nature of displacement in the South Asian context. On this issue, see Vandana Desai, “Urban widows: living and negotiating gendered dispossession in speculative slum housing markets in Mumbai.” Gender, Place & Culture (2020): 1–21; Clara Mi Young Park, “‘Our lands are our lives’: gendered experiences of resistance to land grabbing in rural Cambodia.” Feminist Economics 25, no. 4 (2019): 21–44, and, Gillian Hart, “Denaturalizing dispossession: Critical ethnography in the age of resurgent imperialism.” Antipode 38, no. 5 (2006): 977–1004.
- 3.
See the work of Normas Geras, Discourses of extremity: radical ethics and post-marxist extravagances. Verso, 1990, as well as the more recent take on radical ethics of care as exemplified by Kathleen Skott-Myhre et al. “Towards a radical ethics of care.” Journal of Child and Youth Care Work 22 (2009): 228–242.
- 4.
Carol Gilligan, In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press, 1993.
- 5.
On the issue of gendering forced migration, see inter alia, Doreen Marie Indra, ed. Engendering forced migration: Theory and practice. Vol. 5. Berghahn Books, 1999, Eleonore Kofman, “Gendered global migrations.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 4 (2004): 643–665, Floya Anthias, “Metaphors of home: gendering new migrations to southern Europe.” Gender and migration in Southern Europe: Women on the move (2000): 15–47, Susan Martin, S. F. (2004). Refugee women. Lexington books, and, Jane Freedman, Zeynep Kivilcim, and Nurcan Özgür Baklacıoğlu, eds. A gendered approach to the Syrian refugee crisis. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
- 6.
I am indebted to Obiora Okafor and his analysis of TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) as both theory and method in my formulation of ethics of witnessing as both method and intervention. See Obiora Chinedu Okafor, “Critical Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL): theory, methodology, or both?.” International Community Law Review 10, no. 4 (2008): 371–378.
- 7.
For a directly applicable theoretization of critical scholarship as praxis in the area of race theory, see Chandra L. Ford and Collins O. Airhihenbuwa. “Critical race theory, race equity, and public health: toward antiracism praxis.” American journal of public health 100, no. S1 (2010): S30–S35. The authors argue that critical race theory provides fertile grounds for developing a transdisciplinary methodology that grounds scholarly analysis in a transformative vision of social injustice. I make a similar argument in the context of feminist work on forced migration emanating from the Global South though the methodology I propose is a direct engagement with ethics of witnessing.
- 8.
According to Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens (2002), there are at least three broad trends that define the role of the scholar/intellectual in the society: the Dreyfusards and “new class” theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu, treat scholars/intellectuals as potentially a class-in-themselves; Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and in general theorists of “authenticity” treat scholars/intellectuals as representatives of their group of origin and thus class-bound; finally Karl Mannheim, Edward Shils, and Randall Collins treat intellectuals as relatively classless and able to transcend their group of origin to pursue their own ideals as well as articulate new ideals for the society at large. In this work, I take side with the last of these three categorizations.
- 9.
Katz, C. (2001) “On the grounds of globalization: a topography for feminist political engagement.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(4), 1213–34.
- 10.
See Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, and Sara Ahmed, eds. The affect theory reader. Duke University Press, 2010.
- 11.
Hyndman, J. (2004) “Mind the gap: bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics.” Political Geography, 23(3), 241–366. In her work, Jennifer Hyndman has insistently argued that although refugee studies includes gender analyses, scholarship in the field traditionally neglected the deployment of a feminist framework and thus generally lacked the ability to trace the power relations that shape politics of forced migration. She puts special emphasis on the concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’, which she identifies as a form of globalization allowing for a powerful intersection of social and political domains. This latter issue, though very important, does not fall under the purview of the present analysis. Also see Hyndman, J. “Introduction: the feminist politics of refugee migration.” Gender, Place & Culture 17, no. 4 (2010): 453–459.
- 12.
Massey, D. (1999) Power-geometries and the politics of space-time, Hettner-Lecture. Heidelberg: Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg.
- 13.
Staeheli, L. (1999) Globalization and the scales of citizenship. Geography Research Forum, 19, 60–77.
- 14.
Lawson, V. (1998) Hierarchical households and gendered migration: a research agenda. Progress in Human Geography, 22(1), 32–53.
- 15.
On the issue of public intellectuals, see Richard Zinman, Jerry Weinberger, and Arthur M. Melzer, eds. The public intellectual: between philosophy and politics. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, Richard Posner, Public intellectuals. Harvard University Press, 2009, Helen Small, ed. The public intellectual. John Wiley & Sons, 2008, David L. Swartz, David “From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics.” Theory and Society 32, no. 5–6 (2003): 791–823.
- 16.
For the most succinct formulaic statement of this approach, see Christina Clark-Kazak, “Ethical considerations: Research with people in situations of forced migration.” Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees/Refuge: revue canadienne sur les réfugiés 33, no. 2 (2017): 11–17.
- 17.
For an overall view of this debate, see Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Witnessing the inhuman: Agamben or Merleau-Ponty.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 1 (2008): 165–186. Of particular significance for the Holocaust Studies literature on the issue of the impossible witness is Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. Taylor & Francis, 1992. Also see Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Lyotard reader and guide. Columbia University Press, 2006.
- 18.
See Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: beyond recognition. U of Minnesota Press, 2001 as well as her Oliver, Kelly. The colonization of psychic space: A psychoanalytic social theory of oppression. U of Minnesota Press, 2004. Also see Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. Taylor & Francis, 1992.
- 19.
See Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford University Press, 1999.
- 20.
See Michalinos Zembylas, Teaching with emotion: A postmodern enactment. IAP, 2006 as well as Michalinos Zembylas, “Witnessing in the classroom: The ethics and politics of affect.” Educational Theory 56, no. 3 (2006): 305–324.
- 21.
On the issue of how to deal with historical trauma in an education setting, see Roger Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert, eds. Beyond hope and despair: Pedagogy and the representation of historical trauma. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield (2000), Ann C. Berlak, “Confrontation and pedagogy: Cultural secrets, trauma, and emotion in antioppressive pedagogies.” Counterpoints (2004): 123–144, Valerie Walkerdine, “Progressive pedagogy and political struggle.” Screen 27.5 (1986): 54–61, and, Robin L. West, “Re-imagining justice: Progressive interpretations of formal equality, rights, and the rule of law.” RE-IMAGINING JUSTICE: PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS OF FORMAL EQUALITY, RIGHTS, AND THE RULE OF LAW, Aldershot, UK/Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Dartmouth (2003): 12–074.
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Canefe, N. (2022). Gender, Dispossession, and Ethics of Witnessing: Method as Intervention. In: Chowdhory, N., Banerjee, P. (eds) Gender, Identity and Migration in India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5598-2_5
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