Crisis, Risks, New Regionalisms and
Im(Mobility) in Europe
The University of Milan 14 November 2018
Department of Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication
P.zza I. Montanelli, 1 Sesto San Giovanni, Aula T11
Convenors: Claudia Gualtieri and Lidia De Michelis (Courses of “Culture Anglofone” and “Cultura Inglese”)
In 2014-2016, with the biennial project ‘Crisis, Risks and New Regionalisms in Europe’, Claudia Gualtieri of the University of Milan in partnership with Cecile Sandten of Chemnitz Technische Universität obtained the DAAD Hochschuldialog mit Südeuropa.
Two conferences were organised, in Milan and Chemnitz, and a book was published which explored the systemic crisis that Europe has been facing and the emerging forms of regionalism that have threatened to disrupt the European Union.
Students, artists and academics contributed to the reflection using the methodological tools of Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory in interdisciplinary dialogue. Today, the problematic and worrying conditions of the European Union make the debate worth continuing.
The conference “Crisis, Risks, New Regionalisms and Im(Mobility) in Europe” adds a fourth term to the complex articulation of the research field – namely Im(Mobility) – in order to extend the debate to the issue of movement, and the difficulty if not impossibility of movement that is affecting Europe.
Politics of protection, wall raising, detention and push-back raise borders, separate and imprisonpeople, while political populism and resurgent conservative drives prevent the possibility of dialogue and constrain practices of solidarity and welcoming. In addition, the political and cultural forces acting in contemporary Europe appear unable to analyse, understand and elaborate both the fears and the problems existing in European countries where globalisation and rampant capitalism are creating havoc.
Widespread unemployment, growing poverty and inequality, lack of definite perspectives and uncertainty about future present realistic material challenges, while populist rhetoric and media-hype create the emotional background and amplify the anxiety and irritation that produce a situation unable to absorb new tensions and develop policies of openness to mobility and migration.
This conference offers a theoretical discussion of the issue of immobility also presenting projects conceived as exemplary forms of utopia in the present. The notion of utopia is here developed as a political and ethical project that begins in the present and is put into practice in the form of “doing”/making it possible. This approach connects the theme of today’s conference “Crisis, Risks, New Regionalisms and Im(Mobility) in Europe” to the interdisciplinary interdepartmental project of research on Utopia that has been going on for four years at the University of Milan.
10,00-10,30 Opening
10,30-11,00 Claudia Gualtieri
(Im)Mobility across the Postcolonial Middle Sea
11,00-11,30 Cecile Sandten
The Current Crisis in the City of Chemnitz: Analyses, Commentaries, Reflexions
11,30-12,00 Itala Vivan
The Vexed Question of the Memory of Migration in Italian Museums
12,00-12,30 Pap Khouma
”Ventimila viventi sotto il mare di Sicilia”. A reading
12,30-13,00 Modou Gueye
Raconteatrando di e con Modou Gueye, Senegalese actor
13,00-14,30 Pause
14,30-16,00 David Herd
Walking with Refugee Tales
16,00-16,30 Luca Ciabarri
Transformations of violence: Young Somali migrants in Libya, 2008-2018
16,30-17,00 Lidia De Michelis
Reclaiming human movement, restor(y)ing hope
17,00-18,00 Discussants: Marta Baraldi, Yodit Estifanos Afewerki, Roberto
Pedretti, Ilaria Villa