Reflections from/ on ‘the field’: the activist and the activist scholar
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About this Event
This paper looks to reflect and disrupt: to reflect upon the positionality of its authors working with displaced people, and to disrupt the understanding of what the fields of research and activism ‘should’ necessarily look like.
This project started as a conversation one evening on the island of Samos, following a ‘traditional’ academic meeting some months earlier in which one author asked to interview the other. During multiple interactions we started to challenge our positionality and our fields. This paper, then, is intended to be one, admittedly small, way of challenging the inherent power structures embedded within knowledge collection, extraction and dissemination.
We ask questions about the role of the NGO sector and academia in presenting the lives of people, sometimes objectifying and silencing them in the process. We discuss how this can be challenged and the role of solidarity in establishing a different approach to working with groups of people often presented as ‘vulnerable’.
Dr Gemma Bird is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and IR at the University of Liverpool. Her research sits at the intersection between political theory and IR, focusing recently on migration and citizenship. Recently published in Palgrave’s International Political Theory Series and the journals Global Policy, Cooperation and Conflict and Citizenship Studies.
This free, online event is part of the Politics and IR Public Lecture Series hosted by the Politics and IR section of the History, Politics and Philosophy Department at the Manchester Metropolitan University.
Joining instructions will be emailed to participants nearer the time of the event.
Queries should be directed to Dr Kathryn Starnes - k.starnes@mmu.ac.uk