Affective Shifts Inside and Outside the Nation and Body: Rethinking How Refugee Research is Engendered

This Academic Symposium is an attempt to rethink how to analyse the spaces and socialites of our lives with a focus on research with refugees and asylum seekers. It certainly requires greater ethical courage as well as deeper theoretical efforts to imagine the affective shifts of perspective that may help us challenge the complexities of contemporary times, especially the peculiar configuration of the relationship between the state and the bodies of refugees played out in punitive policies and damaging political rhetoric. This Symposium will aim to highlight how relationships that break down perceived boundaries of researcher and researched engender a different politics of affirmation with which the current tenor of public debate on refugees can be challenged.