Negotiating Narratives
Protecting Access to Education with Performance: The Student Movement in Chile
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alicia Del Campo
This paper addresses the political role played by performance and social theatricality in the context of the inequalities in access to high-quality education produced by pervasive neoliberal reforms imposed during military regimes and consolidated during transitional periods in Chile. Performance and social theatricalities have become an essential element of political activism in contexts where re-democratization processes have relied heavily on spectacular democracy rather than participatory democracy. In the case of Chile, the critical discontent with the results of the neoliberal reforms implemented was marked by the eruption of the massive 2011 student movement that almost paralyzed the nation. An essential element of the movement success was their practical use of performance in political action to communicate protesters’ demands and to rearticulate the meaning of urban space. This essay demonstrates that these tactics, grounded on a poetics of the body, symbolically re-appropriated the neoliberal city—segregated and consumption driven—and transformed it momentarily into a lively and energized counter-neoliberal space, where a community marked by solidarity and the promotion of social change, emerged. Occupying the city became the overarching modality where students physically occupied public spaces with their bodies through demonstrations, school strikes and occupations, flash-mobs and public interventions. By massively appropriating the city through these various means, the movement became a tangible expression of both the neoliberal malaise and disenfranchisement characteristic of Chile’s transitional democracy.
The Potential of Children’ Stories to Promote Equitable Classroom Integration for Refugee Children: Case Study in an Algerian Secondary School
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarra Boukhari
Refugee studies have lately emerged as a focused area of research yet there is a gap vis-à-vis the integration experiences of diversified refugees in educational settings. The available literature predominantly focuses on the integration of refugees into the host society without substantially considering the diversity factor; thus viewing the refugee community as a homogeneous entity. This study seeks to examine the nature and complexity of refugees’ experiences and their relevance to the integration processes. It aims to understand ways that may facilitate integration amongst refugees within mainstream school classrooms. It investigates the possibility of refugee children’s stories as a way to explore and deal with different issues of integration in the Algerian secondary school context with both Arab and African refugees. Accordingly, stories are used to develop positive values that could be affected by war and conflict experiences. These stories can potentially boost their understanding of key social concepts that can facilitate acceptance and integration among refugee communities. This study invokes the theoretical framework provided by Jerome Bruner’s construction of the narrative through real life experiences. The idea is to voice children’ sense making of their own world and integrate it with good values to help them construct a positive narrative. The study incorporates a theoretical perspective that gives account to the LVE (Living Values Educational) model that enables integrating good values within education. Qualitative methods are integrated to investigate the readiness and acceptance of Arab and African refugee children to each other in a classroom in Algiers.
From the Cargo Hold to the US 'Black Ghetto': Racial Heterotopias, Relational Racism, and Preserving the White Nation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthew Houdek
I argue that the material and rhetorical construction of the "black ghetto" in the US serves as what Christina Sharpe refers to as “the womb of blackness” – and thus, a condition of possibility for preserving the white nation. These spaces share a fundamental connection to the cargo hold (Moten and Harvey) and the prison (Alexander) and are constructed as empty spaces for casting off the excesses of what is deemed “valuable” within the white nation, epistemologically, ontologically, materially, rhetorically, economically. Therefore, the construction of these spaces of disavowal is required to meet the contingent needs and demands of the US racial state and its deep relations to neoliberal capitalism. Methodically, I appropriate Michel Foucault’s contested concept of heterotopia as a heuristic for prying open these spaces. While Foucault’s concept is broad and obtuse, I re-animate his concept through race scholarship to contribute to the decolonial project of disrupting Communication Studies ingrained whiteness (Flores, Wanzer-Serrano). Theoretically, through this lens, I begin to think through the relational logics that construct the black ghetto over and thru time as a space of disavowal that has its origin in the cargo hold and the black Atlantic. Critically, I argue that examining these spaces helps to demonstrate the inherent relations between white supremacy, anti-blackness, US state violence, and neoliberal capitalism and which therefore allows us to confront these manifold forces at their intersections in order to create openings for, as Rob Asen writes, “making connections that neoliberalism,” and whiteness I add, seeks to deny.
Institutional Listening to Refugee Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Diana Kreemers
Various projects facilitate refugees in telling stories on their own terms. Digital and alternative media have opened up opportunities for self-representation. Many authors celebrate the ability of refugee media to give voice to communities, to pluralise voices in the public sphere, and to counter mainstream media representations (Bassel, 2017; Budarick, 2017). This is essential in democratic terms, as media inform public opinion and are key resources in policymaking processes. However, the literature on minority media is unclear on how the amplification of voice and pluralisation of narratives lead to democratic participation and recognition (Fraser, 2003). Dreher (2010; 2017) proposes a focus on ‘political listening’ to shift some of the responsibility for media impact from the communities involved to the receptiveness and responsiveness of decision makers and opinion leaders. In this paper, I explore how listening by professionals in democratic institutions can lead to recognition for refugees. The paper presents the outcomes of an extensive desk research on refugee media, recognition for minorities, and listening in government communication. I analyse the democratic potential of refugee narratives as defined by literature on community and minority media (Garman & Wasserman, 2018; Nikunen, 2018). This is compared to the ambitions for and practices of listening to government communication (Bickford, 1996; Macnamara, 2016).
