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ETMU Conference 2024

Race, bordering and disobedient knowledge

Organizers: Suvi Keskinen (suvi.keskinen@helsinki.fi) and Aminkeng Atabong Alemanji (aminkeng.atabong@abo.fi)

Time: Thursday 7.11. at 13.00-14.30 (Session 1) and 16.15-17.45 (Session 2)
Place: Linna K112

The panel explores distinct ways in which racialisation-migration nexus is challenged in everyday life, art and activism. More precisely, by focusing on resistant small-scale practices that challenge the grim realities of people seeking to cross the external borders of the Schengen area and everyday racism and structural inequalities within European states the panel addresses knowledge as a site for disobedience.

Disobedient knowledge, both contesting and seeking to exceed racial categories, is articulated in activism and social movement practices, but also in the everyday struggles that build on the gendered, racialised and classed experiences of racialised minorities and postcolonial migrants living their lives at the border.

The panel draws on contributions to the edited volume Race, Bordering and Disobedient Knowledge (Manchester University Press, June 2024) that brings together analyses of antiracist activism and migrant (solidarity) mobilisations, as well as centring everyday struggles rather than protests or mass demonstrations. It elaborates theoretically and empirically how disobedient knowledge is created by racialised minorities and postcolonial migrants living their lives at the crossroad of different kinds of (b)ordering practices. Further, the book addresses the often disharmonious and sometimes painful negotiations between differently positioned actors in the everyday struggles of activism, antiracism practices, migrant and solidarity movements, and collaborative research.

We invite researchers interested in these themes to submit abstracts to the panel. The panel will introduce contributions from the book but is open also for other scholars.

Abstracts

Session 1

Sanna Ryynänen, University of Jyväskylä: They could have stayed home

In my latest article, I looked at how the Finnish print media wrote about migration and migrants during the years 2019–2021. The themes covered in the texts varied from characterisation to, for example, work, family, legislation and language, but one theme stood out as especially interesting: seeking refuge / refugees. It was the third most often mentioned theme in the data of 301 texts, but, in addition, it divided the data in two distinct sets: those texts that were related to refugees were much more negative in tone than those texts which dealt with other kinds of migration. Moreover, in the background level it was possible to discern a story which turns refugees from people in distress to criminals and enemies. Its basis lies in the texts’ unwillingness to mention explicitly the fact that people were fleeing something and seeking refuge, or to report the circumstances that had led people to set off on their journey. Instead, an image of people who could have just as well stayed home was formed. And since they could have just as well stayed home, they had deliberately caused us immense problems by “flooding” “our” borders. They forced us to resort to the border guard, the police and the military in order to respond to their “threat.” The refugees ended up equalling pests, criminals and enemies, and we ended up being the victims. – And racist discourse ended up as the “rational and neutral” way of reporting about refugees.

 

Aino Nevalainen, The Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), University of Helsinki: Contention and Concerted Consensus Over (Anti)Racism: Tempering Black Lives Matter in Finnish Mainstream Media

Black Lives Matter broke through to the Finnish mainstream media in the summer of 2020, surfacing into the consciousness of the general majority White Finnish audience from the networks and activities of activists of color and Black activists. The scarcity of mainstream media discussions on racism before BLM emphasizes the significance of this contention. It highlights the efforts of media-savvy activists in connecting to media to mobilize people and to create and maintain contention, making visible and challenging the conditions and practices of belonging and exclusion based on racialization. This presentation, based on an article currently under review, focuses on what happens when mainstream media do engage with contention related to race and racism. Utilizing frame analysis, this research examines 263 articles published in three Finnish mainstream media news outlets between May 2020 and September 2021 to analyze what kind of frames were mobilized and how specific frames were (de)prioritized in mainstream media contention related to racism and antiracism during and following the demonstrations. Of the five most prevalent frames, three represent antiracist frames—the frames of experiential racism, structural racism, and colonial complicity—and two represent frames challenging antiracism: the frame from moderation to anti-wokeness, and the frame of denial of colonial/racial history. I argue that while legitimizing and amplifying antiracist frames in general, mainstream media coverage of the BLM demonstrations in Finland and the consequent contention related to (anti)racism also imposed new demands and restrictions on how this contention unfolded and what kind of (anti)racisms were (de)legitimized.

 

Aminkeng Atabong Alemanji, Åbo Akademi University: Designing an antiracism mobile phone application: A reflection on the process and discourse as disobedient knowledge

After years of studying the issue of racism, UNESCO in 1960 described racism as the social cancer of our time that gnaws away slowly and insidiously until it invades the whole organism of society and erupts in violence and death. This cancer was alive before UNESCO diagnosed it and has continued to evolve, corrupting more societies. The changing form of this cancer requires developing new techniques and new research to combat it. One of the main differences in the society we live in today and that of 1960 when UNESCO published their finding described above is the development and advancement in information technology, which has been credited as the most outstanding agent of globalisation. Information technology and the internet have also given room to new forms of racism – one where the perpetrator can afford to be invisible. However, efforts to combat racism have never been as vital as today. As antiracism efforts in and out of school evolve, researchers have argued that combining antiracism with information technology in an antiracism application could produce positive outcomes in the fight against racism. This chapter focuses on how students in one international school critique three reporting antiracism mobile phone applications within the context of a wider project of designing and building a new antiracism app Using critical discourse analysis and set around the framework of critical race theory. The highlights the complexities around race, racism, antiracism and antiracism mobile phone application discourse as well as the outcomes of this complex engagement.

Session 2

Tania Canas, University of Western Ontario: Archiving the Present: Memory as creative practice Multi-local and site-specific creative memory work between Australia and El Salvador

Archiving the Present (AtP) is a multi-site digital community archive project of “remembering as insurgent practice” (Cusicanqui 2020, p.xxxii) and memory as creative practice, from a Central American, site-specific, and multi-local perspective. The project is made up of artists and community members who are primarily of the Australian Salvadoran community, having arrived in Australia through the refugee and humanitarian program in the 80s and early 90s. Archiving the Present seeks to develop alternative practices of remembering through digital, material and public interventions that sit at the intersection of practice-as-research methodologies (Nelson 2013), critical community frameworks (Nancy 1986, Joseph 2002, Tuck 2009) site-specific art and public intervention (Kwon 2004, Jackson 2011). Importantly AtP does so from the context of forced displacement, Central American and border studies (Anzaldúa 1987, Cañas, 2015, Cárdenas 2018) decolonial theory (Cusicanqui 2020, Tuhiwai-Smith 2012) as well as literature which contextualises setter-colonialism specifically within Australia, including perspectives from Blak1 feminist Aboriginal academics (Wolfe 2006, Moreton-Robinson 2015, Watego 2021, Ball 2018). Archiving the Present began in 2021 as a collective quick-response activism to the destruction of a Salvadoran community mural (painted by the children of the Salvadoran community in the Kensington public housing flats in 1990) as part of a $10.2 million ‘redevelopment’ of a community recreation centre. Since then, AtP has expanded to run a series of interventions including: a community library of Central American texts in Náhuat, English and Spanish, an online 8-month introduction to Náhuat course for the displaced diaspora, exhibitions, and public projects as well as events. This article explores some of the key methodological questions considered in the ‘making’ of research alongside ‘making’ in the creative sense, and memory ‘making’; in ways that seek to counter hegemonic heritage regimes (Ireland, Brown & Schofield, 2020).

 

Suvi Keskinen, University of Helsinki: Memory, Epistemological Justice and Disobedient Knowledge in Nordic Activism and Art

This presentation examines how activists and artists racialised as non-white or ‘others’ narrate marginalised histories of colonialism and racism and, by doing so, create understandings of Nordic societies that challenge prevalent ideologies of colour-blindness and national self-images as champions of human rights. The chapter analyses the actions through which activists and artists call for epistemological justice and create disobedient knowledge. It argues that histories of overseas colonisation and slavery are central for the disobedient knowledge created in activism in the Nordic region, as in other parts of Europe, but such narratives are also placed in dialogue with histories of colonisation of Indigenous lands within the Nordic region and commemoration of more recent events of racist violence. The presentation shows how the activists are combining academic research, collective memory and art to create disobedient knowledge that challenges the silencing of past and present racism. Addressing responsibility over the effects of slavery and colonialism on current European societies, their organisation of welfare and the groups given possibility to enjoy its benefits can open up new discussions of social justice and inclusion. Accounts of responsibility can provide resources to thinking that moves beyond the legacies of colonialism and slavery, as well as for politics that seeks to counteract the racial hostility characteristic of present European societies. The analysis is based on extensive fieldwork, interviews with activists, and media material collected in Denmark, Sweden and Finland in 2015-2019.