Counter Narratives of Crisis: An Interactive Dialogue on Migration, Resistance, and Solidarity

Workshop Presentation
Monisha Bajaj,  Magid Shihade,  Zeena Zakharia,  Maria Hantzopoulos,  Sunaina Maira,  Roozbeh Shirazi  

In this workshop that addresses “vectors of society and culture,” we interrogate the meaning of “crisis” through examinations of Western-centric narratives and political definitions of crisis that erase the ongoing precarity and permanent crises of racialized and subjugated groups. We wish to question for whom, by whom, and where crisis is defined. Through transnational research spanning the US, France, and Greece, we will discuss examples that rupture the temporality of crisis as an exceptional moment of emergency. For example, the Covid pandemic is a global health crisis that has highlighted ongoing medical apartheid, economic and educational inequities, and the transnational lockdown of populations already immobilized due to war, siege, and border regimes. In the US, there is an imperial amnesia about crises overseas and the ravages of US-backed military interventions in places such as Yemen, now synonymous with “humanitarian crisis.” We will examine the racialized logics of hospitality and solidarity in the global “refugee crisis” and enactments of migrant solidarity and antiwar resistance that counter the humanitarian politics of “emergency.” The facilitators of this interactive session will briefly share their research in different sites on issues of displacement, resistance, solidarities, and counter-narratives that unsettle dominant notions of crisis. We will discuss how refugee, migrant, and diasporic communities resist the manufacturing of crisis through activism, digital storytelling, and reimagining belonging. After a brief framing, the facilitators will pose questions to engage participants in discussion and to elicit reflections on what crisis means in, and across, their own contexts and research settings.