Colonial and post-colonial governance systems involve a biopolitics, that is the management of human life including that of birth, health and disease, sexuality and spatial mobility, and the disciplining of bodies. They also comprise a necropolitics in that specific populations are excluded from legal and socio-political recognition and reduced to mere biological existence. This workshop explores how embodied subjects navigate these regimes of power. Bringing into conversation ethnographic studies of the body within migration, health and disability contexts across Africa, the Middle East and La-n America, this workshop aims to address the following questions: How are bodily practices and embodied subjectivities shaped by past and present local and global governance systems and associated inequalities? How do individuals agentively employ their body as a medium to know, experience and become? And how are bodies mobilised to resist or transgress asymmetrical power relations?
Schedule
10:00 – 11:10
- Welcome & introduction
- VERONICA GOMEZ-TEMESIO, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland HES-SO, School of Social Work, Fribourg.
- Laboring Bodies: Vulnerabilty and Immunity in Times of Ebola
- CLARA DEVLIEGER, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Culturelle et Sociale, University of Lausanne.
- Disability and distribution: becoming a valuable person in Kinshasa
11:10 – 11:25 - Break
11:25 – 13:00
- SHIRIN HEIDARI, Gender Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute.
- A typology of Transactional Sex in forced displacement: gendered patterns, drivers and consequences
- VALERIA MARINA VALLE, Global Migration Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute & Universidad Iberomericana Mexico City.
- Bodies of Resistance: Care and Agency for Women and LGBTQ+ Migrants in Mexico
- ANNE-LINE RODRIGUEZ, Global Migration Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute.
Caring for the migrating body at the Euro-African border
Please contact anne-line.rodriguez@graduateinstitute.ch to register