As media attention veers ever more abruptly from one site of immobilized immiseration to another – from officially designed EU Hot-Spots in Southern Europe, to long entrenched scenes of border conflict, to new outposts of the increasingly punitive conditions of human mobility for many people in the world – the Localities of Welcoming Network proposes to continue the work developed through the COVID-constrained months via a series of online discussion sessions linking particular locales marked by the effects, adaptations and innovations resulting from new patterns of intensified mobility and imposed immobility.

In 2020-2021 our network focused its attention on particular cities across Europe (Athens, Paris, Calais) but also locations such as Malta, Palermo and the border into Serbia. Building on the work of the collective New Internationalists volume (ed. Sue Clayton, Goldsmiths, 2020) which plotted a series of ‘flashpoints’, the aim of this network is to sustain a conversation across localities that are linked transnationally as much by the EU immigration directives as by the autonomous mobility of people ‘in displacement’, whether actually on the move or not. The prime objective of this network is to build on links which are enacted and effective, yet often overlooked in the tendency to focus discussion through national paradigms, through particular languages, or through pre-given, State-led categories. Our starting point is a network of relations between scholars and activists, as well as people whose knowledge and action may stem more directly from finding themselves penalized or immobilized by the contemporary immigration regime. We hope to strengthen these relations as well as to develop our understanding of what these ‘convulsive spaces’ (De Genova, 2020), these ‘points de fixation’ (Milne, 2021), share, how they are enmeshed in longer historical trajectories and structured by complex interconnections between different forms of struggle.

In the first of a new series of discussions, we will focus on psycho-social care for marginalized and precarious migrants, addressing questions relating to addiction, depression, and other psycho-social pressures concentrated in and around the localities where people live and work most directly under the hostile forces generated by contemporary immigration regimes and excess policing.

The key questions are

• What does it mean to make care our standpoint (in addition to rights, in recognition of the obstacles to achieving rights)?
• How does care for vulnerable, displaced and mobile people intersect with or manage depend upon care within the more sedentary structures of activist networks?
• How does access to institutional types of care e.g. medical care, mental health care, relate to care within community and informal groups? What sorts of reciprocal support between institutional and “informal” or autonomous structures exists or can be fostered?

Presenters

• Dr Maria Pisani (University of Malta) on care in the context of Malta
• Professor Lynne Segal (Birkbeck) on the Care Manifesto
• Caoimhe Buttelry (Comhlamh), speaking from Athens, and Lou Hemmerman on their recent project, a collaboration between Ulex, Comhlamh and others, supporting organisations working in the Mediterranean.

The Localities of Welcoming Network is an initiative led by Professor Sue Clayton, Goldsmith’s University of London, and Professor Anna-Louise Milne, University of London Institute in Paris, to support transnational dialogue about the effects of border regimes. It is also supported by a steering group that includes Theodoros Fouskas (University of West Attica), Maria Pisani, (Malta) and Pru Waldorf (Refugee Solidarity Summit).

Registration

To register for this online event, please email Goldsmiths, University of London: e.pickett@gold.ac.uk