Refugee heritage

h. 14.30-17.30 | Online

Organized
The Series of seminars "The camp: researching violence, exclusion and temporariness" are part of the Urban and Regional Development PhD program and are organized by Prof. Camillo Boano.

Seminar description
Refugee camps are established with the intention of being demolished. As a paradigmatic representation of political failure, they are meant to have no history and no future; they are meant to be forgotten. The history of refugee camps are constantly erased, dismissed by states, humanitarian organizations, international organizations and even self-imposed by refugee communities in fear that any acknowledgement of the present undermines a future right of return. The only history that is recognized within refugee communities is one of violence and humiliation. Yet the camp is also a place rich with stories narrated through its urban fabric. In tracing, documenting, revealing and representing refugee history beyond the narrative of suffering and displacement, Refugee Heritage is an attempt to imagine and practice refugeeness beyond humanitarianism.

Speaker
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are situated between politics, architecture, art and pedagogy. In their practice art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts.
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Seminar series description
The camp is emerging at the crossroads of urban studies, architecture, geography, anthropology and humanitarian practice, reflecting both the spatialisation of biopolitics and the urbanization of emergency. Camp studies have expanded recently and have been codified merging humanitarian practice with various urban dimensions, putting knowledge, protocols in crisis.
This seminar series "The camp: researching violence, exclusion and temporariness" is intended to offer a reflection on the dispositif of the camp reflecting on the tensions between permanence and temporariness, exception and normalization, politicization and depoliticization. The below series of seminars are part of the Urban and Regional Development PhD program but open to everyone who wish to attend and contribute and are set out to initiate a collective and transdisciplinary discussion to engage in such specific site of enquiry, struggle and subjectivation. Registration is needed.

Seminar series program
12.01.21 | 14.00 - 17.00 (GMT + 1)
The politics of inhabitation
Nasser Abourahme | Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University, NY, US

19.01.21 | 14.30 - 17.30 (GMT + 1)
Refugee Heritage
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti | DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research)

26.01.21 | 14.00 - 17.00 (GMT + 1)
Spatial violations: reflections on socio-spatial practices inside Palestinian camps
Samar Maqusi | University College London, UK

09.02.21 | 14.00 - 17.00 (GMT + 1)
Talking camps: space, community and ‘the urban’
Wan Sophonpanich | Global CCM Cluster Coordinator, International Organisation for Migration

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To join the class
camillo.boano@polito.it