Spaces and Places
Factors Affecting Attitudes on Immigration: Moral Foundations Theory and Attitudes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leda Kanellakou, Chris Gifford, Nicholas Pedriana, Jim Mc Auley, Marta Fulop
Social scientists of various stripes have built a comprehensive research program studying public attitudes towards immigrants. Immigration is currently among the most contentious political issues in the United States and Europe—evidenced in part by the election of Donald Trump, the UK’s Brexit vote, and the recent rise of nationalist parties on the continent. Drawing from the moral foundations theory perspective (Haidt 2013) and the entrenching and the persuasion hypotheses (Day, Fiske, Downing, and Trail 2014), we conducted experiments in the United States and United Kingdom. Results confirmed moral foundations significantly influence how political ideology relates to immigration attitudes, but the way it does so is more complex than originally expected. Further information around the amplification hypothesis (Clarkson, Tormala and Rucker 2008) plus work on novel information by Petty, Tormala, Brinol, and Jarvis (2006) is considered. Implications and recommended changes for future research is discussed.
Fictional Realism: Architecture and Science Fiction Dimensions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joao Rosmaninho DS
Following Mark Fisher’s theoretical work on contemporary society and literature, science fiction (SF) may enhance multiple understandings of a globalised reality. According to the thinker, the SF genre resonates a permanent link between present modes of governance and scopes of inequality. At some point, we notice that current political systems tend to deal with migration and statelessness in a way quite common in some dystopias. Either in literature or in cinema, it comes as no surprise that narratives such as “Low-Flying Aircraft” and “The Children of Men” can definitely represent places (and regimes) similar to existent environments and movements. The decrease in the birth rate, the migrant crisis, and economic unbalanced populations are all realistic topics these fictions seem to have anticipated and dealt with. This study considers how certain literary and cinematic visions have adapted, depicted, and assembled parallel versions of the urban space under nondemocratic dimensions. Through these two fictional realisms set in the near future, we aim to present urban elements such as walls, refugee camps, or abandoned buildings as displays for these violent and extreme experiences. In fact, they reveal with accuracy unstable and insecure architectures that characterize part of our human and urban emergencies. Thus, according to Fisher’s latest book, even though the formulation of a ‘capitalist realism’ may be the best method to scrutinize our present state, we believe that a ‘fictional realism’ is needed to complement it.
School for All - a Ray of Hope in the Middle of the Current Migrant Crisis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sergio Madrid
A report by the Department of Homeland Security (2018) indicates that most undocumented immigrants arriving in the US during the actual migrant crisis are coming from Central America - particularly from the Northern Triangle region (i.e. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), but also an increase of the migrants from the Caribbean region (e.g., Cuba, Haiti). Although I concede some efforts and collaborative agreements among the regional nations have been made, I still maintain that we shall not see a solution soon. Most of the scholars in the field find the roots of our migrant crisis trace back to decades of US interventionism and bloody coups in Central America (Gordon, 2019). However, as a result of my study, I found a more complex cluster of reasons such as indigenous prosecutions, poverty, unemployment, lack of opportunity. In the middle of this migrant crisis, a group of Mexican teachers organized freely and instinctively to trying to teach the hundreds of children and adults trapped in Juarez, Mexico, both waiting to cross to US soil and ask for refugee or waiting for their court appointments. This paper narrates an oral history of the main actors involved in this beautiful project (e.g., teachers, priests, Mayan children, and their families, migrant children, and their families, the Juarez community).
