Virtual: Unsettling Borders 2020 Conference: ‘Midnight Traveler’ (2019)

Midnight Traveler: Uncertain Journeys to and through EU

This panel will focus on the film Midnight Traveler, a 2019 documentary filmed on cell phone cameras by an asylum-seeking filmmaker and his family traveling from Afghanistan to Europe. This documentary is a first-hand account of displacement and border crossing, providing insights into the cruelties of border regimes and systems of refugee governance.

Panel

Emelie Mahdavian, Co-writer and editor of Midnight Traveler

Lily Herbert, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Nadia Yaqub, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Christian Wilhelm, Humboldt University of Berlin

Unsettling Borders 2020 Conference

This virtual conference explores how Middle Eastern refugee and immigrant experiences provide insights into the production of difference, boundaries, and borders by unsettling established understandings of identity, statehood, and territory in and on the edges of the European Union. In the context of a “fortress Europe” and growing xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism, it will address questions about who refugees and immigrants are and how they position themselves (or find themselves positioned) within systems of power operating at multiple scales and across a variety of spaces. This conference will center embodied Middle Eastern refugee and immigrant experiences to understand and theorize subjects, political spaces, and technologies of governance.

The conference includes a series of panel discussions and a roundtable:

Panel 1: Queer Refugees/Queering Refugee Studies (October 9, 2020)

Panel 2: Midnight Traveler: Uncertain Journeys to and through EU (October 16, 2020)

Panel 3: Racialization of Refugees in the EU (October 23, 2020)

Panel 4: Refugees and the “Crisis” of States: Rethinking Border Regimes and State Technologies/Mechanisms in the EU (October 30, 2020)

Roundtable: Learning, Teaching, and Community-Building with Refugees (November 6, 2020)

Registration and More Information

Find more detailed information about the conference.

Registration for this event is required.