Refugee Academics- Britain as a place of sanctuary November 8th, 5.30pm

Refugee Academics- Britain as a place of sanctuary November 8^th, 5.30pm

See Also: http://www.academic-refugees.org/lectures.asp

University of East London, Docklands Campus.

Room:East Building 1.04

November 8th, 530-730pm

The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics would like to invite you:

Refugee academics - Britain as a place of sanctuary

Jeremy Seabrook, guest lecturer, renowned author

Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) and the Refugee Studies Programme

University of East London,

November 8th

5.30-7.30pm

Jeremy will be looking at the history of refugee academics in the UK, whilst assessing the role of UK universities in welcoming refugee academics,including questions of academic freedom.

The talk will outline the history of CARA from 1933 to the present and its continuing relevance, as the numbers of academic refugees in the UK increase.

The trials, tribulations and politics of welcoming refugee academics will be highlighted with reference to the many testimonies in CARA's 75thanniversary publication 'The Refugee and the Fortress.'

The talk will be an opportunity to gain further understanding of refugee academics disposition in the UK from the 1930's to today, with the unique perspective of a charitable organizations that started in the UK in 1933.

To RSVP Please email info.cara@lsbu.ac.uk

UEL: Cite Them Right - Online Version

Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2010) Cite them right: the
essential referencing guide. 8th edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (Palgrave Study Skills)

How to access Cite them right off and on campus

·         Open the University of East London website at http://www.uel.ac.uk

·         Click on UEL DIRECT

·       Students

·        Type in your network username and password e.g.

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·         Staff

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Type your network username and password e.g.

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Once you have successfully logged into UEL Direct

·         Click on UEL PLUS

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From  UEL PLUS, you have two options to read the book

Option 1 - Under Course List

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Click on Academic Integrity – Resources for students

·         Click on Useful links

·         Click on Cite them right.

·         The publication will load

Option 2 - Under Campus Bookmarks

·         Click on Cite them right

The book will load

New CMRB Events Released

The Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at UEL have just announced the following events for the 2010 Autumn semester:

Research Seminars:

Thursday 14 October: 2-5pm in room BS.3.04

“What’s happening in political asylum in 2010”?

Speaker: CMRB Visiting Fellow, Prof Carole Bohmer

Competing discourses of protection and control are predominant in present day asylum rhetoric. Satisfying these conflicting goals is impossible; states therefore must find a way to appear to meet both of these goals. How do they do it? This paper will attempt to answer that question and illustrate the sometimes absurd effects of this process, using the cases of the US and the UK which have been the focus of my research.

Wednesday 17 November: 2-5pm in room EB.G.10

"Blaming the victims - Sarkozy and the plight of the Roma".

Speaker: Dr Jim Wolfreys, Kings College London.

Wednesday 24 November: 2-5pm in room EB.G.10

“Muslim Women and Marriage in Trans-jurisdictional Contexts” Speaker: Dr Prakash Shah, Queen Mary, University of London How do immigration officials and judges manage when judging the validity of acts of marriage solemnisation, which take place on trans-jurisdictional terms? How do we explain their responses? These are some questions raised by this paper, which presents evidence gleaned from the writer’s own work as an ‘expert’ witness in immigration cases. Two case studies have been selected on the basis that the chief issue in contestation is the validity of a trans-jurisdictional marriage among South Asian Muslims, and therefore raise the issue of whether the marriages are valid according to Muslim law. The paper also raises some questions for future research, given that we know little as yet about how recognition of minority trans-jurisdictional marriages takes place across European legal systems and, in particular, the role of experts who get involved in the legal processes in which such marriages are contested.

Wednesday 1 December: 2-5pm in room EB.G.10

"Migrants and the security agenda: the global picture".

Speaker: Dr Khalid Koser, Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

Imaging Migrants Seminar Series

Imaging Migrants seminar series is collaboration between the Centre for

Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB), and Matrix East

Research Lab (MERL).

Monday 15 November: 4.00-5.30pm, Matrix East Research Lab, EB.1.37

"Journeys of Identity and Place"

Speaker: Jill Daniels

I will explore the representation of identity and place in exile and loss in my documentary films Next Year in Lerin (2000) and Lost in Gainesville (2005). The subjects in Next Year in Lerin are Macedonians, who as children were taken without their mothers from northern Greece by the Greek Communist Party during the Greek civil war (1943-1948) and are not

allowed by the Greek State to return to Greece. In Lost in Gainesville subjects from the Mexican diaspora located in a small town in Georgia in the south of the US face racist hostility, leading to the geographical division of place. I will also reflect on the way film may be used in the debate around minoritarian discourse through the way Next Year in Lerin has been taken up by the Macedonian diaspora and Greek nationalists as a tool for political

debate on YouTube.

Monday 29 November 4.00-5.30 pm, Matrix East Research Lab, EB.1.37

Speaker: Agnieszka Piotrowska

Agnieszka Piotrowska is a BBC trained, award winning and highly acclaimed documentary maker, nominated three times for an EMMY as well as for BAFTA for her film about domestic violence (2000). She has been the winner of the Fred Wiseman Master Class Award in Dublin (2005 for her film The Bigamist) as well as receiving distinctions and prizes at other

festivals. Her film last summer The Best Job in the World (BBC1 2009) was the highest rating programme for the whole week across all channels. Her CUTTING EDGE for Channel 4 about domestic violence (2000) has been called a definitive piece on the subject and was nominated for BAFTA. Her recent work includes a highly acclaimed documentary about a co-dependent relationship between anorexic female twins: Trapped by Mytwin (A Cutting

Edge for Channel 4) and a film about women who fall in love with objects and not people: Married to the Eiffel Tower (2008) which has become a cult documentary all over the world. She will show us clips of her films and talk about migrating both internal and external.

Monday 6th December 4.00-530pm, Martix East Research Lab, EB.1.37

"Digitizing Palestinian refugee narratives"

Speaker: Dr John Nassari

This session will explore the role of multi-media interactive technologies in the representation of Palestinian life and history in refugee camps in Lebanon. The session will examine work I produced in 2007-2008 that presents refugee camps in 360-degree QuickTime panoramas. The viewer navigates from alleyways to alleyways to homes where three generations of Palestinian refugees tell their life histories. The session will explore

methodological challenges of representing refugee lives.

Monday 13 December: 4.00-5.30pm, Matrix East Research Lab, EB.1.37

"The Powerless Image."

Speaker: Dr Anat Pick

The post-Soviet films of Artur Aristakisyan include some of the most striking images of poverty and up-rootedness of recent cinema. These images, however, function neither as documentary evidence of nor even as a bearing witness to post-Soviet realities. Pitted against the revolutionary modernism of Vertov and Eisenstein, I read Aristakisyan's cinema as an articulation of a paradox at the heart of leftist emancipatory politics: the desire for justice as sovereignty without power.

Spring and Summer Events 2011

Full dates and details to follow. However, in the new-year there will be a

conference on ‘Secularism, Racism and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’, jointly organized with the Runnymede Trust. In addition, CMRB will be in collaboration with the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University, organizing a seminar series dealing with key conceptual issues in forced migration.

Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging - www.uel.ac.uk/cmrb

Refugee Archive Summer Opening Hours 2010

Please read the whole email, including the important paragraph at the end.

Please find below the revised opening hours for the Refugee Archive at UEL and the Docklands Library over the summer months.  We have tried to keep the Archive open every day.  However, we would recommend that you either make an appointment or contact us in advance of your trip just to confirm that the Archive will be open and staffed on the day you wish to come. 

Our contact details are:  020 8223 7676 (reading room) or 020 8223 7817 (Paul Dudman) or 020 8223 6462 (Caroline Lam) in the office.  Our email address is library-archives@uel.ac.uk

Alternatively, if coming to the Docklands Campus is a problem, you might want to make use of the SCONUL Card service which can give you access to other University libraries in London.  Further details can be found on the Library website by following the link below:

http://www.uel.ac.uk/lls/services/sconulfaq.htm

Archive Summer Opening Hours

The summer opening hours for the Refugee Archive will come into effect from Saturday 22 May, 2010.

Therefore, the revised opening hours from Monday 24 May, 2010 will be as follows:

Mondays:                   1pm - 4.30pm

Tuesdays:                  1pm - 4.30pm

Wednesdays:            10am - 1pm

Thursdays:                 1pm - 4.30pm

Fridays:                      10am - 1pm

Sat / Sun:                   Closed

These are also available on our website at:  http://www.uel.ac.uk/rca/using-rca.htm#top

Library Summer Opening Hours

The summer opening hours for the Docklands Library start from Saturday 5 June.

So the building closes at 9pm on Friday 4 June, then it's:

Monday-Friday: 9am-9pm (Security only from 5pm)

Saturday: 10am-5pm (Security only)

Sunday: closed

Potential for Possible Disruption

It is possible that there may be further disruption to these opening hours over the course of the summer.  As soon as we have further information we will of course let you know, but at the moment disruption to the archive may be caused by:

i) Building works in the Library.  Work on the library air conditioning system is due to start on Tuesday 8 June. The work itself is supposed to take place between 9pm and 6am. However, there is a small possibility that the library may close at some point.

ii) Scanning of the British Olympic Association (BOA) archive.  We are due to have a company on site in the Archive to scan materials from Monday 14 June for a period of between 2-4 weeks.  Disruption of the archive service during this period is inevitable and we strongly recommend that you make an appointment for to access the Archive as we cannot guarantee that the archive will be available fro general access during this period.

iii)  Staff leave.  There will be staff on leave over the summer months and we hope this will not cause too much disruption to the service.

Refugee Archive Closure on Tuesday 2 March

Important Notice:

The Refugee Council Archive will be closed all day on Tuesday 2^nd March due to refurbishment work being undertaken in the Archive reading room.  We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

Many thanks in advance for your co-operation,

Paul Dudman
Archivist.

Imaging Migrants: CMRB & Matrix Seminar Series at UEL

Imaging Migrants

a seminar series jointly organised by CMRB and Matrix

All seminars take place on Thursdays at 6-8pm in Room EB 1.37, Matrix, University of East London, Docklands Campus   

On ‘the right to have rights’ over refugees’ and migrants’ images - Eyal Sivan

Thursday 25 February

Refugees, migrants and other survivors – like many other socially displaced persons – are among the favourite classical, as well as contemporary, figures of documentary moving image practice. Thus, despite the ongoing practice involving documenting, filming, producing and distributing refugees’ images, issues of ‘representation rights’ and ‘images appropriation’ are rarely raised among practitioners and media activists. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s classical article ‘We Refugees’ (1943), in which she develops the idea of ‘the right to have rights’, and on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Arendt’s article, this seminar will reflect on the ethical and methodological questions raised by the ongoing practice involving the filming of migrants and refugees. Articulated around a series of recent documentary experiences, this seminar will address the question of the functionality – within western societies – of refugees’, migrants’ and asylum seekers’ images as a fundamental, contemporary documentary media practice.

State of Play: critique, diaspora and digital archives - Roshini Kempadoo

Thursday 25 March

The seminar will present a selection of my photographs and recent digital artworks including State of Play(2010) within the context of artworks from digital online databases, including those developed by Autograph ABP, Diaspora Artists and Iniva. It becomes a way to explore artists’ work that have been differentiated and defined within the confines of ‘identity’ terminologies and politics. Cultural definitions of artists and their work, ranging from: black Britishness; BAMEs; multiculturalism; transnational blackness; culturally diverse forms; and art of the diaspora, have variously been used – particularly since the ‘critical decade’ of the 1980s (Hall & Bailey, 1992). My interest lies in the practice of self-definition, criticality and positionality that have been instrumental to this process of defining difference and belonging. The presentation will also explore the way in which such artworks are currently being digitally archived by institutions, their curators, and funders. The archive as a ‘force field’ (Stoler, 2009) in this sense is crafted and layered. In re-contextualising and digitising the artworks as the online ‘archive’ (in the way that Derrida describes the archive as the site of ‘house arrest’), how may the criticality of the work be adequately evoked and continue to be perceived as creative intervention, interstitial, or counter-narrative?

Two Theses on the Afghan Woman: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf Filming Agheleh Farahmand - Haim Bresheeth

Thursday 8 April

This talk is based on an article by the same title, that I have completed for Third Text, to be published in March 2010.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created a huge number of refugees, or as the UN now wishes them to called, internally displaced persons. Those two terrifying upheavals have not yet been attended to by many filmmakers – the Iraqi one is yet to be represented on film, and the Afghani one has indeed been so represented, but not by an Afghani filmmaker.

The appearance, in 2003, of two films made by two sisters of the famous Makhmalbaf cinematic clan, have marked another first for this unusual group. At Five in the Afternoon, a feminist feature film shot in Afghanistan a short time after the Allies invasion, by the elder sister Samira, has been closely followed byJoy of Madness, a feature length documentary by her 13 year old sister, Hanna. That Hanna’s film was a ‘making of’ film of her sister¹s movie production, does not begin to describe it. At the heart of both films stands the figure of the main lead of the feature, who is the central character of both. The struggle between the temperamental director and her intended star, ending in the agreement to participate, is presenting us with a complex picture of power relations and negotiation, between the darling of festival circles, Samira, and her penniless, but astute and independent young teacher from Afghanistan. Joy of Madness carries a genuine and disturbing message of the colonial power relations between the three women, and the acid test of their different feminist agendas.

Journeys of Identity and Place - Jill Daniels

Thursday 22 April

In this seminar I will explore the representation of identity and place in exile and loss, in my documentary filmNext Year in Lerin (2000).I will discuss, as Henk Slager points out in his article Art and Method (2009), how ‘the artist compels us to see the world in a different way… images do not replace reality, but reveal novel visibilities’. The film reflects on social structures, ethnicity and the concept of rootedness. Place is offered as a metaphorical space bounded by the subjects’ voices and the manipulation of sound and image.

The subjects are Macedonians, who as children were taken without their mothers from northern Greece by the Greek Communist Party during the Greek civil war (1943-1948). They are not allowed by the Greek State to return to Greece.I will analyse my access as outsider, addressing my subject position of both observing and participating in documentary making, in gaining an intimate space in order to interact with the subjects (David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema; 1998).

I will extend the discussion through a comparison of this film with my later film Lost in Gainesville (2005), where subjects from the Mexican diaspora are located in a small town in Georgia in the south of the US.Racist hostility emanates from the original population of the town leading to the geographical division of place.

I reflect on the way film may be used in the debate around minoritarian discourse. Next Year in Lerin has been used by the Macedonian diaspora and Greek nationalists as a tool for their political debates. I give particular attention to my Q&A on YouTube posted by the film festival after a screening of the film in the US in 2009, and the subsequent comments. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWw4o9QkAA.

Simone Weil's The Need for Roots and the Soul of Migration - Dr Anat Pick

Thursday 6 May

This seminar draws on Simone Weil's book The Need for Roots (1943), written during the final year of Weil's life, working in London for the Free French. The Need for Roots offered a blueprint for the reconstruction of France after Liberation. It reflects the culmination of Weil's theologico-political thinking. The central themes of rootedness (as a ‘need of the soul’) and uprootedness (as a modern malaise) are especially important for thinking about ideas of national identity, diaspora and exile. They are particularly resonant in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in light of Weil's ‘anti-Judaism’. The discussion will address Weil's contemporary relevance as a major post-secular thinker with reference to Ori Kleiner’s documentary filmRecognized (2006).