konferencija 2024

Why this conference? Almost half a century after Raymond Williams’ seminal Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, keywords have become a prominent format of textual elaboration and exchange in many fields across the humanities and social sciences. Migration and border studies seem especially suited for keywording and keywords knowledge formatting. In the last decade, a number of keywords related to these and complementary research fields were published, starting with New Keywords: Migration and Borders (De Genova, Mezzadra and Pickles, eds. 2015) and Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe” (De Genova and Tazzioli, eds. 2016) to Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements (Salazar and Jayaram, eds. 2016), Humanitarianism: Keywords (De Lauri, ed. 2020), Minor Keywords of Political Theory: Migration as a Critical Standpoint (De Genova and Tazzioli, eds. 2022) and Keywords on Forced Migration and Refugee Studies (Banerjee, Singh and Chowdhory, eds. 2023).

In 2020, we, a group of researchers from Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, initiated the research project The European irregularized migration regime at the periphery of the EU (ERIM) in order to explore the multiple pathways on the way “from ethnography to keywords”, as stated in the project subtitle. After the publication of the e-ERIM online network of keywords in 2022 and a number of research articles, as well as a keywords book volume (Balkanska ruta: pojmovnik europskog režima iregulariziranih migracija na periferiji EU. Zagreb: Sandorf, 2024), and organizing a series of round tables, presentations, workshops and student seminars, we wish to go further and create a space in the form of a conference dedicated to the rethinking, redefining and reflecting on keywords of the European irregularized migration regime from specific peripheral and ethnographic perspectives.

Our research focus is mainly on the so-called Balkan route and the south-eastern borderlands of the EU. While adhering to that focus in this conference, we also invite contributions from colleagues researching in different internal and external, political, economic, material, symbolic and other peripheries of the EU and beyond.

The conference is looking for empirically, predominantly ethnographically based comparative and historical contextualizations, as well as theoretical and critical discussions of keywording and “key” words of the irregularized migration regime on/from the peripheries. Contributions on the following topics, but not limited to them, are welcome:

• keywords and keywording of borders, bordering and irregularization: border control, border violence, necroviolence, externalization, internalization, weaponization of the landscape, fencing, incarceration, surveillance, deportation, detention, pushback, manhunt, vigilante groups, border abolition, categorizations, conceptualizations, victimization, securitization, spectacularization, technology, media, literature, documents, orders, agreements, strategies, policy papers etc. 
• keywords, keywording and life and death at the border: actors, objects, vehicles, places, practices, peripheralization, precarity, mobility, immobility, hypermobility, border crossing, smuggling, search and rescue, humanitarianization, securitization, relocation, resettlement, encampment, stuckedness, waiting, disappearances, game, escape, transit, everyday life, health, education, work, struggle, sights, sounds, emotions, affects etc.
• methodological and theoretical perspectives on keywords and keywording: academic research, academic and other writings, formats and genres, ethnography, reflexivity, textuality, political, poetical, engaged, militant, decolonial and related research approaches, extraction, academic exploitation and business etc.

Organizers: The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (Croatia) research projects The European Irregularized Migration Regime at the Periphery of the EU: from Ethnography to Keywords (The Croatian Science Foundation, IP-2019-04-6642)  and Poetics and Politics of Ethnography  Today (European Union – NextGenerationEU) in collaboration with The Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), The Institute of Ethnography of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Serbia) and The Association of Croatian Architects (Croatia).

Conference organizing and program committee: dr. sc. Marijana Hameršak (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb), prof. dr. sc. Uršula Lipovec Čebron (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), dr. sc. Duško Petrović (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb), doc. dr. sc. Mojca Piškor (Academy of Music, University of Zagreb), dr. sc. Marta Stojić Mitrović (Institute of Ethnography of SASA, Belgrade)

Contact: erimconference@ief.hr