Crisis and Conviviality in the Mediterranean
PROGRAMME SCHEDULE
September 24, 15:00-18:00 (CEST/GMT+2) | ||
15:00 – 15:30 Welcome and introduction to the workshop with Rima Sleiman (INALCO), Martin Zillinger (UoC), Christoph Lange (UoC), Emanuele De Simone (UoC) | ||
Part I – Sharing projects and research on/in the Mediterranean | ||
15:30 – 15:40 Statelessness as Ethical Loneliness in the World of Uneven Nation-States Presenter: Barzoo Eliassi (LU) | ||
15:40 – 15:50 Decolonizing Integration Theory: Towards a Re-retheorization of Migrants’ Integration in the Global South and the Global North Presenter: Amira Ahmed (AUC) | ||
15:50 – 16:00 Poetical cultures across the Mediterranean area as an example of shared intangible cultural heritage: habits, environments, and improvisation Presenter: Mariagrazia Portera (UNIFI) | ||
16:00 – 16:20 Q & A Session Chair: Simon Holdermann (UoC) | ||
16:20 - 16:40Pause | ||
16:40 – 16:50 Experiences and citizen metrology of pollution on the shores of the Mediterranean (Fos-sur-Mer & Narbonne, France) Presenter: Christelle Gramaglia (Montpellier, G-EAU) | ||
16:50 – 17-00 Sensing socio-environmental injustice through multidisciplinary community-based research and interventions in the Mediterranean Presenter: Christoph Lange (UoC) | ||
17:00 – 17:10 Interreligious conviviality and hospitality: Shared sacred sites in the Mediterranean Presenter: Manoël Pénicaud (CNRS, CJB) | ||
17:10 – 17:30 Q & A Session Chair: Martin Zillinger (UoC) | ||
Part II – The way forward | ||
17:30 – 18:00
|
Barzoo Eliassi | Linnaeus University, Department of Social Work
Barzoo Eliassi holds a PhD in social work (2010) and serves currently as an Associate Professor at Linnaeus University where he teaches at undergraduate and graduate levels. His research area engages with ethnic relations, social policy, social work, Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas, citizenship and multiculturalism in Middle Eastern and west European societies. Before joining Linnaeus University, he served as postdoc as the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University between 2011-2013 and worked as a researcher at the International Migration Institute at Oxford University in 2014 where he carried out research among Kurdish and Palestinian Diasporas in Sweden and the UK. Eliassi has taught at the two-year international interdisciplinary Master's programme in Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University and undergraduate, graduate and doctoral courses within the social work program at Linnaeus University. He worked as program coordinator for the master program in social work, 2019-2021. On August 2022, he was promoted as full professor in social work at York University, Canada.
Statelessness as Ethical Loneliness in the World of Uneven Nation-States
In this presentation, Barzoo Eliassi will draw on his book Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) to outline a framework to understand the lived experiences of statelessness among members of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in Western Europe. Eliassi maintains that citizenship is an inadequate solution to the problem of statelessness based on a critical investigation of the lived experiences of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in western Europe. Effectively, Eliassi examines how statelessness affects identity formations, homelessness, belonging, non-belonging, otherness, voices, status, (non)recognition, (dis)respect, (in)visibility and presence in the uneven world of nation-states, indicating a political position permeated by ethical loneliness. Eliassi also demonstrates that the undoing of non-sovereign identities’ subjection to structural subalternization and everyday inferiorization requires rights in excess of the mere acquisition of juridical citizenship, which tends to assume national sameness. That assumption in turn involves sovereign practices of denial and assimilation of ethnic alterity. The talk therefore highlights the necessity of de-ethnicizing and decolonizing unitary nation-states that are based on the politico-cultural supremacy of a single, “core” ethnicity as the sovereign legislator of the rules and regimes of national belonging and un-belonging. Eliassi therefore broaches questions of “majority” and “minority,” mobility, nationalism, home-making, equality, difference and universalism in the context of the nation-state and illustrates how stateless peoples such as Kurds and Palestinians endure and challenge their subordinate position in a hierarchical (geo)political order and how in so doing remain bound by political otherness.
Amira Ahmed | American University in Cairo, Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology
Amira Ahmed is both a scholar and practitioner with a long experience in the area of diaspora engagement, migration, refugees, paid domestic work and human trafficking. Both her master's and PhD degrees focus on the intersectionality of gender, class, and ethnicity within local and global dynamics. In contrast, her PhD dissertation examined the vulnerabilities of migrant women domestic workers in Egypt (Ahmed, 2010). Ahmed also worked with leading humanitarian/development organizations such as UN-IOM in Jordan and Egypt and IFRC in Switzerland. Recent publication: co-author of Skills for Science Systems in Africa: The Case of Brain Drain. In an interdisciplinary approach, her current research focuses on examining cultural heritage-making practices and sites along migration routes across national and continental boundaries from Africa to Europe, focusing on the political agency and relationalities of migrants/refugees and their advocates. Hosted by SEA Department, Ahmed is currently performing a research associate position and leading the research project Traces of mobility, violence and solidarity: Reconceptualizing cultural heritage through the lens of migration. TRACES is multi-site collaborative research represented by the American University in Cairo, Mila University/Italy, London Gold-Smith University, and Jendouba University/Tunisia.
Decolonizing Integration Theory: Towards a Re-retheorization of Migrants’ Integration in the Global South and the Global North
The project seeks to investigate the intersections of human mobility, migration, refugee integration, and agency, with a focus on comparing the divergent concepts of “integration,” inclusion, and exclusion through a decolonizing perspective. By exploring how integration is understood, discussed, and practiced in distinct regions, the project aims to contribute to the broader debates in migration studies and policies. In the Global North, integration is often framed as a one-sided process that expects migrants to assimilate into the dominant norms and culture of the receiving society, a perspective that has been heavily criticized for reinforcing neo-colonial dynamics. Scholars argue that this approach neglects the agency of migrants and the structural barriers they face, while also disregarding their transnational identities and affiliations. This critique of integration as an expectation of conformity is particularly evident in European and American academic contexts, where it has been increasingly challenged for perpetuating hierarchical relationships and marginalizing minority cultures. Additionally, debates on integration in the Global North serve as mechanisms for gatekeeping, determining who is included or excluded from the national community, and often ignoring the multidirectional attachments migrants maintain. In contrast, the Global South context presents a different set of challenges for integration. Despite hosting the majority of the world’s refugees, countries in the Global South have not historically been considered permanent destinations for migrants and refugees, and thus integration policies are either weak or non-existent. In many countries in the Global South, refugees often rely on international organizations and informal networks for support, with little to no access to formal rights such as employment or citizenship. The concept of integration in some countries of the Global South is further complicated by regional instabilities, political violence, and the increasing criminalization of migrants as well as externalization of border policies. Despite the absence of formal integration policies, migrants and refugees in the Global South often engage in “self-integration” through community-based organizations and informal networks. The aim of this project is to contribute to a re-theorization of integration that acknowledges the diverse and informal processes at play in the Global South, as well as the structural barriers that persist in the Global North.
Mariagrazia Portera | University of Florence, Department of Literature and Philosophy
Mariagrazia is a researcher at the University of Florence, Department of Literature and Philosophy (DILEF). Her main research interests lie in Aesthetics, the History of Aesthetics, Evolutionary Biology, and the Environmental Humanities. She moved from themes and topics concerning the history of Aesthetics between the 18-century and the 19-century in Germany and German literature (with a focus on the relationship between the life sciences and aesthetics) to themes and topics concerning the history of Darwinism, Charles Darwin’s aesthetic theory, contemporary evolutionary biology, and the Environmental Humanities, gaining, therefore, a significant intersectoral and interdisciplinary experience. She has written papers and book chapters on topics such as ecological aesthetics, aesthetics of biological conservation, aesthetics of biodiversity. Also, in the last few years she has been working intensively on the role of habits, habitual knowledge and improvisational capacities in the aesthetic experience and in artistic creativity.
Poetical cultures across the Mediterranean area as an example of shared intangible cultural heritage: habits, environments, and improvisation
The concept of "conservation" is poised to become increasingly critical in the coming decades as we face the dual crises of environmental degradation and the loss of both cultural and biological diversity. But what exactly should be conserved, and for what purpose? In both the fields of cultural heritage and biodiversity, the prevailing approach has been largely object-centered: the goal has been to preserve at-risk elements of culture and nature for future generations as though they were a collection of discrete objects or entities, valued for their tangible, material existence – whether animate or inanimate – whose integrity must be safeguarded over time. On one hand, we preserve monuments and artworks to protect them from destruction; on the other, we conserve endangered species – once identified and catalogued – as if they were static entities, separate from the ever-changing dynamic processes of evolution. But what if the key to effective conservation of our imperiled planet lies in shifting from an object-based approach to one focused on processes? What does it mean to conserve a process, whether in relation to natural or cultural heritage? In this context, the idea of intangible cultural heritage, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023, takes on new importance. What defines intangible cultural heritage? How can it be preserved and transmitted, given that it involves not physical objects but intangible practices and processes? In this brief presentation, I will present an example of intangible cultural heritage – the traditions of performative and improvised poetry found throughout the Mediterranean – and consider how these traditions can offer a valuable cultural resource for addressing environmental challenges.
Christelle Gramaglia | University of Montpellier, G-EAU
Christelle Gramaglia, director of research at the G-EAU laboratory (Gestion de l'eau, acteurs et usages) at the French National Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (INRAE) and lecturer at the University of Montpellier, is a sociologist of the environment. For many years, she has been working on pollution from the angle of the controversies that generate friction between different forms of knowledge on ecological and health risks. After examining lay expertise in this field, such as that of anglers, she turned her attention to ordinary experiences of pollution, with a view to documenting the ways in which people living on industrial and mining sites are forced to come to terms with damaged environments. She has carried out ethnographic and quantitative surveys in France, in towns along the Mediterranean coast, as well as in Spain and Portugal, then in Senegal (discussed in her book “Habiter les pollutions industrielles. Métrologies et expériences citoyennes”, published in 2023 by Presses de l'Ecole des Mines, Paris). In recent years, she has also been involved in experiments in participatory and citizen science, with the aim of generating “situated knowledge” about pollution. For example, she has been involved with the Eco-citizen Institutes for Pollution Knowledge in Fos-sur-Mer and Aude (two departments in the south of France). She is also developing original participatory methodologies to help citizens influence technical decisions on river restoration - and renew water policies in France.
Experiences and citizen metrology of pollution on the shores of the Mediterranean (Fos-sur-Mer & Narbonne, France)
Pollution is often seen as an invisible problem, but on mining and industrial sites, the accumulation of pollution makes it tangible. This short intervention will look at the social and political effects of invisibility. The aim is to give an account of the ways in which local residents can come to grips with pollutants and the knowledge they can develop about them. It argues in favor of a reappropriation by citizens of the monitoring of ecological and health risk in the Mediterannean and beyond.
Christoph Lange | University of Cologne, MESH
Christoph Lange is the Academic Programme Manager of MESH. He studied Social Anthropology and Middle East Studies (Master’s degree, two majors) at the University of Leipzig from 2004–2011. With his first travels to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan he set his research focus on the Levant region within the Arab Middle East. From 2008–2012 he worked for the German state-funded Collaborative Research Center 586 Difference and Integration at the Universities of Leipzig and Halle/Lutherstadt Wittenberg where he conducted his first ethnographic research about Bedouin representations in Syrian television dramas and Arab media discourses about authenticity. From 2014–2018, he was a research assistant of Martin Zillinger and doctoral researcher at the Research Lab Transformations of Life of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. Since 2018, he has been working at Martin Zillinger’s chair at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the UoC. In 2020, he successfully completed his doctoral thesis on Decolonizing the Arabian Horse – The Breeding, Circulation and Certification of the Straight Egyptian Arabian in the 21st Century which was awarded with the second place of the dissertation prize of German Anthropological Association (DGSKA/GAA) in 2021. Currently, Christoph Lange is developing a postdoctoral project on socioecological crises and intersectional collapses in the Mediterranean by adopting a Critical Zones’ perspective. Furthermore, he is founding member of the Mediterranean Liminalities Research Lab at the UoC. In this capacity, together with Martin Zillinger, he co-leads the EUniWell Research Initiative Crisis and Conviviality in the Mediterranean (2024–2027). Christoph Lange is also the speaker of the GAA Mediterranean Regional Group. In 2021, he was a contributing editor for the CASTAC Platypus Blog.
Sensing socio-environmental injustice through multidisciplinary community-based research and interventions in the Mediterranean
The project investigates the entanglements of socio-economic and environmental crises impacting the Mediterranean and MENA region from a multidisciplinary perspective. The research focus lies on local communities, who are already exposed to socio-economic risks and who are the most vulnerable to the impacts of global environmental change and related environmental effects. The two main research questions are 1) What are the mitigation strategies of these communities concerning these crises?, and 2) How are these communities targeted by socio-environmental interventions and engaged with environmental initiatives or ecological grassroots movements to strengthen their (climate) resilience? The project’s research focus lies on promoting site-specific, comparative in-depth qualitative research on the dynamics of multiscalar socio-environmental transition processes. The project’s aim is to enhance actionable knowledge through transdisciplinary, community-based participatory approaches. In this context, “sensing” means the employment of publicly engaged, multimodal research methods and devices that make invisible injustices visible to public discourse and foster critical engagement. The project brings together UoC researchers and international researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds with local partners who are engaged in community-based research projects. The project aims to create a research network that strengthens existing research initiatives and forges new links that benefit the UoC’s overall internationalization strategy.
Manoël Pénicaud, CNRS, Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat
Manoël Pénicaud is a research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and an anthropologist at the Centre Jacques Berque in Rabat. His main research interests lie in pilgrimage studies, shared holy places and interreligious relations in the Mediterranean. For the past 20 years, he has been studying pilgrimage sites attended by the faithful of different religions all around the Mediterranean.
Interreligious conviviality and hospitality: Shared sacred sites in the Mediterranean
Despite representations of impassable religious borders, the fieldwork carried out collectively show that the faithful can temporarily cross these material and symbolic borders to go and pray “in the place of the Other”. In general, they come to seek a miracle, a cure, help or grace when the reputation of the saint is recognised and important. This contribution will present this phenomenon under the prism of interreligious hospitality, how people of different faith sometilmes converge, meet and temporarily coexist in the same religious space. Manoël Pénicaud is also a curator of the touring exhibition “Shared Sacred Sites” held at the Mucem in Marseille (2015), then in Tunis, Thessaloniki, Marrakesh, New York, Istanbul, Rome, etc. This topic of research has been also translated in a recent website that will be presented: www.sharedsacredsites.net/