Colloquium on “Facing Violence, Transgressing Boundaries: Issues of Care at Borders” | Center for Southeast Asian Studies Kyoto University

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Colloquium on “Facing Violence, Transgressing Boundaries: Issues of Care at Borders”

Zoom meeting ID: 982 8377 4647
Passcode: 574276

Presentations:

  • Nation-State, Refugee, and Vulnerability: Changes in the “Face” of Rohingya Refugees (Ai Sugie)
  • Chasing Fate & Fortune in the Borderland: Cross-Border Marriage & Migration at the Malaysian-Thai Frontier (Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif)
  • Boundaries of Housing and Homing Refugees: From the Violence of Temporariness to a Familial Ethics of Care (Miriam Jaehn)

Speakers:

*Nurul, Aisha, and Miriam will be at the venue in person.

Ai Sugie (Aisha Khanam) is a Senior Lecturer at the Graduate School and Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University. She specializes in social geography and research on minorities in Bangladesh. Her main publications include Reconsidering Caste (2023, in Japanese), The Rohingya’s Predicament: From Bangladeshi / Japanese Perspectives between Acceptance and Friction (2024, co-editor, in English).

Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif is a social anthropologist and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Bergen, Norway working on the intersection of Islam, intimacy, and the state in Muslim Southeast Asia and the Malay world, with extensive fieldwork experience in Malaysia and Southern Thailand.

Miriam Jaehn is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University. In her work, Miriam focuses on the experience of Rohingya refugees across South and Southeast Asia. Her current project questions if and how refugees transgress boundaries of housing and homing their families through care as a form of mundane politics.

Summary:

Crossing borders and transgressing boundaries are two essentially different activities, yet both bear great relevance to those living in borderlands. Jones (2012) argues that residents of borderlands “transgress,” not simply cross, borders. They turn the borderland into a space of refusal as they do not accept the state’s intention to draw boundaries between land and people. As residents of borderlands transgress borders and boundaries, the state struggles to assert its sovereignty and fears for its “national security.” In its struggle, the state often acts with little care for the human security of people living in the borderland. (International) Non-governmental organizations attempt to fill this void of care. However, these organizations may also operate from the point of control, display paternalism, and reduce those provided with care to (forgotten) objects of a humanitarian regime. In the end, both state and I/NGOs are at risk of exercising violence against borderland residents through (a lack of) care. In refusal of such (a lack of) care, the colloquium raises the questions: How can states and humanitarian organizations care for and about people living in borderlands without enacting violence? How do families in borderlands enact an ethics of care in refusal of violence? Which pathologies of care persist and arise in an ethics of care understood as “mundane politics” (Kallio & Häkli, 2019)? Posing these questions, the colloquium suggests putting forward an ethics of care that starts “at home” (Noddings, 2002). While Noddings’ theory of care is based on an ideal home, this ideal cannot be assumed for families who experience various forms of violence, vulnerability, and precarity. In contrast, those subjected to violence in its different forms are often under the threat of losing family and home. Hence, the colloquium demands from us “an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries” (hooks, 1994, p. 207).

Works Cited:

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Jones, R. (2012). Spaces of refusal: Rethinking sovereign power and resistance at the border. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(3), 685–699.
Kallio, K. P., & Häkli, J. (2019). Care as mundane politics: Contested familial refugee lives in Finland. Gender, Place & Culture, 26 (6), 795–812.
Noddings, N. (2002). Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. University of California Press.

* The event is organized by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellow 22KF0229 (”Rohingya Refugees ‘Doing’ and ‘Re-making’ Family in South and Southeast Asia’s Borderlands”).