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![Špela Drnovšek Zorko](https://readingdecoloniality.warwick.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/61aa59b40de41222c8ecf4c9_Spela_ZORKO.png)
(Re-)routing as Methodology: Unpacking the Ambivalent Proximities of Eastern European Whiteness with Špela Drnovšek Zorko
Online reading group via Teams
Wednesday 3 July 2024, 10:00 - 11:30 (BST)
REGISTERAbstract
Taking contemporary debates about ‘Eastern European whiteness’ as a point of departure, this session investigates route work as a methodology for tracking racialised relationalities in the postcolonial metropole. It explores hownarrations of distinct whitenesses – including Eastern European (migrant) whiteness, British/English whiteness, and (post)colonial whiteness – produce ambivalent proximities to postcolonial blackness through shared historical references and contemporary co-presence in the hostile environment. While remaining skeptical of the decolonial possibilities of solidarity rooted in ‘off-white’ identities, I propose that understanding how such identities are routed may at least help prise open some cracks in where differently positioned migrants (choose to) stand within the conditions of their encounter.
Reading
In this presentation, the central piece for our discussion is:
⇓(forthcoming late May 2024) Drnovšek Zorko, Špela. ‘Re-routing Eastern European whiteness: relational racialisation and historical proximity.’ In Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race, eds. Baker, C., Iacob, B.C., Imre, A., and Mark, J. Manchester University Press.
Bio
Špela Drnovšek Zorko is a Project Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, and Co-vice Director of the Kobe Migration Research Centre. After obtaining her PhD in anthropology at SOAS University of London, she held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick and a JSPS International Research Fellowship at Waseda University researching racialized postsocialist and postcolonial encounters through the lens of ‘Eastern European’ migration. Her present work continues to centre on questions of migration, racialization, translation, and memory.
![Aya Nassar for Reading Decoloniality](https://readingdecoloniality.warwick.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Nassar-Aya.jpg)
Thinking with the grain of geography: Dust, desert and storytelling with Aya Nassar
Online reading group via Teams
Wednesday 7 August 2024, 16:00 - 17:30 (BST)
REGISTERAbstract
This reading group rests on Architect Sami Henni’s edited book Deserts are not Empty. Henni’s major research and exhibition project on colonial toxicities explores the not very-well known story of France detonating three atomics bombs in Algeria. Nassar will engage with Henni’s exhibition and work around the entanglement of coloniality, postcoloniality with the very grain of the geographies of North Africa. Nassar proposes ‘I have been thinking with dust as an ecological element, a poetic, a metaphor and an embodied entanglement. One that might enable me (us) to interrogate the stories of violence, fragmentation and interruption of space’. With Henni and Agha in the same volume, Nassar will investigate dust, residue, sand and water and the possibility of storytelling violent geographies.
Reading
In this presentation, the central pieces for our discussion are (please email c.french@bham.ac.uk for copies if unable to obtain from your library):
⇓Henni, S. (2022) ‘against the Regime of Emptiness’ in Deserts are not Empty, Columbia books on Architecture and the city, pp. 9-22.
⇓Agha, M. (2022) It is not a Desert my Grandmother Sits in Deserts are not Empty, Columbia books on Architecture and the city pp.51-72.
Bio
Aya Nassar (she/her) is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on urban geographies in the Middle East and North Africa. She is interested in the postcolonial city, archives, poetics, memory, storytelling and infrastructure.
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