Storytelling as Research:
Unsettling the Cultural Politics of Diversity through Filmmaking

Webinar 2 – Postmigrant Narratives II

Talk by Regina Römhild (Humboldt U, Berlin) : “Other Europes in Moments of Post-Otherness” as part of the Migration Center Lecture Series, co-sponsored by UBC Institute for European Studies and the Ziegler Lecture Series of the Dept. of CENES.

Abstract: The making of Europe can be studied through the lens of complex processes of “Othering”, i.e. processes of world-making through borders and boundaries defining a hegemonic “Europeanness” against subaltern formations of “Otherness”. However, these borders and boundaries are constantly contested and undercut in practices of (post)migrant mobilities and mobilizations. Hence, the un- and re-making of Europe can also be studied by looking at these destabilizing movements and their worlding projects. Seen through that lens, Other Europes are constantly in the making as well, if only in certain moments of unforeseen resistance, allience and conviviality. The talk will explore such moments along three ethnographic vignettes in which an improvised social imagination of “Post-Otherness” can be shown to be at work pointing to the presence of unknown futures beyond borderland Europe. It will be argued towards a radicalized perspective that focuses strongly on such subversive, convivial moments rather than merely on the making of borders and differences that especially critical research is predominantly concerned with.