Tuesday 20 March 2018

Our seminar will discuss the concept of the ‘crisis’ as a neoliberal technology of governance placing special emphasis on the biopolitical and thanatopolitical facets of exclusion in Modern Greece. Crises –we argue–produce states of exception, and facilitate the solidification of institutionalised asymmetries between places, spaces and social actors. Drawing from ethnographies of migration –past and present– and research on the effects of the Greek financial meltdown, we initiate a postcolonial analysis of the role of critical events in the coagulation of culturalist and racialised representations of what it means to be ‘Greek’ and ‘European’. Revisiting the intricate relations between mimesis and alterity in their spatial, narrative and embodied expressions, we examine the emergence of new geometries of power and geographies of risk and exclusion. Examining an array of public responses to recent political developments in Greece, we turn the focus to new visions of citizenship and sociality born out of critical historical conditions.

Elizabeth Kirtsoglou is an Associate Professor in Anthropology in Durham University. She has researched and published extensively on gender and politics in Greece. She is the author of For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity and Same-Sex relationships in a Greek Provincial Town (Routledge), and co-editor of United in Discontent: Local Responses to Cosmopolitanism and Globalisation (Berghahn). She is also the Deputy Director of Durham Global Security Institute, an interdisciplinary research institute for the study of securitisation, conflict, international diplomacy and peace processes. Since 2015, Elisabeth is the Principle Investigator of Transitory Lives, an ESRC/DFID funded research project that focuses on migration issues in the Mediterranean.

Giorgos Tsimouris is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Science, Athens. He has conducted research among refugees of the Greco -Turkish war of 1922 from Asia Minor, who settled in Greece. He has published in Greek and English on forced migration and refugee issues, nationalism, intercultural education, seafaring and oral history. His main area of teaching is ‘Anthopology of Migration’ at both undergraduate and post graduate level. He is the author of the book “Imvrii: Fugitives from our place, hostages in our homeland”, on forced migration and the trajectory of the Greek community of Imvros (Gökceada). He also conducted research among seafarers on board and their families. He organised and participated in numerous conferences and workshops in Greece and the UK. Recently, he participated as CO-Investigator in the Project, “Transitory Lives: An Anthropological Research of the Migration Crisis in the Mediterranean” funded by ESRC-UK, dealing with the last refugee ‘crisis’ in Greece and the Mediterranean.

Round Table discussion

Spyros Koulocheris
Lawyer, Head of Legal Research, Legal Service, Greek Council for Refugees

Georgia Spiropoulou
Advocacy officer, Hellenic League for Human Rights

Apostolos Veizis
Director of Medical Operational Support Athens (SOMA), Medecins San Frontieres Greece (MSF)

Thanasis Tirovolas
Project Manager and Researcher, Diotima: Centre for Research on Women’s Issues