The Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway was established to foster a “community of enquiry”. It promotes innovative thought, interdisciplinary initiatives and collaborative research.
2012-2013: Crisis and Transition
Subject to budgetary confirmation, HARC is seeking to appoint up to two HARC Fellows for 2012-13 from inside the College.
HARC Fellowships are open to all FTE staff in the College, but may be of particular interest to those intending to apply for the new AHRC Fellowships scheme, in which applicants have to demonstrate prior institutional support. However, an AHRC application does not have to be directly consecutive upon the tenure of a HARC Fellowship.
HARC expects to support ambitious, interdisciplinary projects that engage the imagination and touch upon salient intellectual, civic, and public issues. The closing date for applications is Monday 9 January 2012. The outcome will be announced by Reading Week of Term 2.
Please submit all applications/nominations to Sue Geddes, HARC Administrator (harc@rhul.ac.uk|).
For all enquiries please contact John O’Brien, Director of HARC (j.o’brien@rhul.ac.uk).
The Fellowships will provide each successful applicant with funding which may be applied towards the pursuit of research in various ways, for example teaching buyout, funding and organizing of research events, conferences, so as to allow the Fellow(s) to pursue her/his research in any field associated with the humanities. Research must be of an interdisciplinary nature.
HARC Fellow(s) typically organize speaker or other events dealing with their chosen topic, with the participation of internal or external contributors, at any level.
The format and frequency of activities developed by the HARC Fellow(s) are open, but these may include, e.g., seminars, mini-conferences, workships, series of talks, etc. HARC will typically provide some further support for such events, including, for example, funding for UK travel and subsistence. HARC will be please to cooperate with other College Research Centres, Departments, etc.
Applications should include a 400-500 word description of the proposed project (including possible events and a brief description of interdisciplinary content) and a short CV. Please indicate whether you are applying for a one-term or two-term Fellowship. Applicants applying for a two-term Fellowship may wish to indicate if a one-term Fellowship is also appropriate, and to consult with their Heads of Department to ensure coordination with Departmental plans.
2011-2012: Welcoming Strangers
The HARC Annual Theme for 2011-2012 is designed to complement and enhance new developments at RHUL. See our Events Calendar for forthcoming speakers, seminars, discussion groups, and conferences pertaining to philosophical enquiry. Further details will be posted on our home page over the course of the year.
In addition to our main theme, HARC will also be hosting various other ad hoc events, as part of larger activity strands, and on occasion as individual events.
HARC events are also recorded and webcast and may be accessed online in real time, or as streaming files through the Backdoor Broadcasting Company|.
Congratulations to our new fellows for the academic year 2011-2012!
Our HARC Fellows 2011-2012 have been awarded to Professor Daniela Berghahn |(Media Arts) and Dr Mustafa Dikeç| (Geography). Their fellowships will serve as a platform for discussion on the broad HARC Annual Theme of "Welcoming Strangers".
We also look forward to three new projects in the next academic year, organised by Adam Ganz| (Media Arts), Dr Katherine Brickell| (Geography) and Dr Rachel Beckles Willson| (Music). Links to further details on these fellowships and projects can be found on the 'Strands' tab above, and will be updated over the coming months.
Fellowship Strands:
1. Daniela Berghahn: Welcoming Strangers|
2. Mustafa Dikeç: Welcoming Strangers: Policy, Politics, Philosophy |
Project Strands:
1. Adam Ganz: Welcoming Strangers? Holocaust Refugees and British Culture|
2. Katherine Brickell: Accommodating Strangers? The (Geo)Politics of Home and Hospitality|
3. Rachel Beckles Willson: Contesting the Performance of Pre-eminence|
Professor Daniela Berghahn (Media Arts)
Short outline of the fellowship project
Welcoming Strangers
In the era of accelerated transnational mobility and mass migration, traditional notions of citizenship and belonging and our understanding of what constitutes ‘the native and the stranger’ have become increasingly problematic. The growing importance of multi-locality, transnational communities, cosmopolitanism and forms of flexible citizenship call binarisms which posit ‘the stranger’ as ‘the Other’ of the indigenous community, as ‘the guest’ who is welcomed by the hegemonic host society, into question. In the context of contemporary Europe, Britain and North America, the strangers that have been welcomed (or not), have largely been ethnic minorities (including ‘white ethnics’), which explains why current public and scholarly discourses on transnational mobility, migration, citizenship and cultural diversity usually intersect with debates on ethnicity and race.
I propose to approach the HARC Fellowship theme for 2011-12, WELCOMING STRANGERS, from the critical vantage points of transnationalism, migration and diaspora studies since these disciplines provide useful heuristic tools not only for a socio-political analysis of forms of hospitality extended to ‘strangers’ (e.g. through asylum, immigration and integration policies), but also for the analysis of cultural production and forms of cultural hybridity that occur in ‘the diaspora space’. Avtar Brah describes it as a conceptual space, ‘‘inhabited’, not only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous’ (1996: 209). It is a site of entanglement in which the dichotomy between the indigenous and the stranger collapses..
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Dr Mustafa Dikeç (Geography)
Short outline of the fellowship project
Welcoming Strangers: Policy, Politics, Philosophy
Though you have shelters and institutions,
Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid,
Subsiding basements where the rat breeds
Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors
Or a house a little better than your neighbor’s;
When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other? Or ‘This is a community’?
And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert
O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
extract from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses From ‘The Rock’
This project proposes to engage with the question of ‘the stranger’ from three perspectives: policy, politics and philosophy. It seeks to do so by bringing together figures of political abjection – the exiled, the asylum-seeker, the guest worker – figures of political subjectivity – the sans papier, the undocumented immigrant – and figures of human finitude – the destitute, the vulnerable, those whose flesh and organs fail them.
The broad aim of the project is to draw attention to ‘the other side’, as it were, of policies and discourses that mobilise the language of hospitality to conceal the very production of ‘strangers’ of all sorts. Welcoming is not necessarily a practice of generosity; it is also an appropriation of place, a home-making practice that then allows the host to offer – or not – hospitality.
The proposed project is aimed at engaging with the political and theoretical ambiguities around ‘welcoming’ through interdisciplinary events. These events, however, are inspired not by theoretical reflection, but by two contemporary episodes of political abjection and mobilisation that put the question of ‘strangers’ on policy, political and intellectual agendas. The first one of these is the Arab Spring, which, among other things, alarmed politicians and policy-makers in the European Union (EU) for it not only was seen as a further reason for migrating to the EU from North Africa, but, more importantly perhaps, it undermined established containment practices that the EU had worked out with the previous regimes (notably in Libya) in order to keep sub-Saharan immigrants at bay. This has greatly upset the recent EU initiatives, marked by a logic of moving asylum overseas. What shape will EU asylum policy take in the aftermath of the Arab Spring? This question will bring together legal scholars, migration specialists and activists who have been working on these issues.
The second episode is the political mobilisation of people that do not officially exist – the sans papiers, or undocumented immigrants. Since the mid-1990s, we have witnessed the formation of a new political subjectivity in western Europe – the sans papiers – who constitute themselves as political subjects in and through urban spaces, eluding formal categorisations and regulations that deny them existence. We have also seen similar mobilisations in the United States, the largest of which took place in 2006 and brought together millions of immigrants (many of them ‘illegal’) and their supporters. What political lessons can we learn from these movements? This question will bring together political theorists and political sociologists working on and with the sans papiers.
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Adam Ganz (Media Arts)
Short outline of the project
Welcoming Strangers? Holocaust Refugees and British Culture
Do not make yourself conspicuous …The Englishman greatly dislikes ostentation loudness of dress or manner…. Do not speak in a loud voice.” (Do’s and Don’ts for Refugees, British Jewish Aid Organizations pamphlet, circa 1939)
Otto Neurath found new ways of showing this new society to itself. Claus Moser presided over its statistics. In science maths and music too the country was transformed by the men and women who fled the Nazis.
These refugees showed Britain to itself, Britain as it would like to be. Both hosts and strangers had pressing reasons for needing this new mythology. The one thing that wasn’t spoken of, was where they’d come from and how the journey had been. That perhaps was the nature of the unspoken agreement between the strangers and their host nation. As the work of Louise London, amongst others has explored, the welcome was not always as hearty as current mythology might suggest. A silence was required from the strangers about the past and where they’d come from.
I would like to explore the nexus between these welcomes and the networks that these strangers received them.
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Dr Katherine Brickell (Geography)
Short outline of the project
Accommodating Strangers? The (Geo)Politics of Home and Hospitality
Bringing together academics, writers, journalists, and students from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, this project will focus on the theme of ‘welcoming strangers’ in respect to home, a space fizzing with meanings, emotions, affect, experiences and relationships that lie at the heart of human life (Blunt 2005). Once cast in the 1970s and 1980s as the epitome of individual freedom, a place liberated and isolated from fear and anxiety, social scientists have moved to re-conceptualise home as a deeply political space where the personal relations it plays host to transect public worlds. With ideas of ‘home’ applicable across scales from the house, neighbourhood, city to nation, the 2 half-day workshops, in-house seminar, and keynote lecture to complete this series will hone in on domestic-practices of hospitality that shape, and are shaped by, (geo)-political processes of war, conflict, empire and asylum. This focus I argue is theoretically and geopolitically salient, tying into the influential work of Jacques Derrida (2000) who squarely positions ‘home’ as central to hospitality debates. As Derrida (ibid. 3) argues, ‘there is no house without doors and windows’, conjuring up a notion of home as the meeting place and metaphorical gateway of ‘guest’ /‘host’ interactions in the modern world – and a world in which hospitality is always shot through with power relations.
The project has been designed to maximise its wider engagement and impact and through its tight thematic focus allow for both historical and geographical reach. The project will begin with a half-day workshop held in Winter 2011 at RHUL Bedford Square that will take a contemporary and geographically diverse look at ‘Accommodating Strangers? Home, Belonging and Citizenship’. It will include papers, amongst others, on practices of (in)hospitality and apartment dwelling in Ramallah, Palestine (Harker), return and transformation in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ‘House War’ (Jansen) and the UK ‘City of Santuary’ initiative in Sheffield to ‘welcome’ Asylum seekers (Darling).
In Winter 2011 the Department of Geography in conjunction with the Department of History will also hold an in-house seminar on research by Dr Jane Hamnett at RHUL on practices of welcome and lodging at the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders in London during the 1850s.
The second half-day workshop held in Spring 2012 at Bedford Square is entitled: ‘Strangers in the Day and Night: Was Post-World War II Britain really hospitable?’. The workshop will include papers on domestic cosmopolitanism, hospitality and the politics of belonging in London (Nava) the hosting of tea parties for Commonwealth students (Craggs) and the welcoming back into the domestic realm of soldiers from war (Langhamer).
Lastly in September 2012 to coincide with the launch of the MSc in Geopolitics and Security Studies, the project finale will take the form of a keynote lecture by renowned scholar Professor Sara Ahmed on ‘Stranger fetishism and the cultural politics of emotion’ (furthering her 2004 book). This event will be widely publicised, held potentially in the Windsor auditorium and will appeal not only to social scientists in general but also to geopolitics and international relations scholars in particular who have recently turned to emotions – and Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘emotionality of texts’ namely - to understand and explain events in world politics (see for example Coen Leep, 2010).
Taken together then the project will deliver an unique opportunity for vibrant and inter-disciplinary exchange between experts both internal and external to RHUL from history, geography, politics and international relations, media and communications, cultural studies and social anthropology.
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Dr Rachel Beckles Willson (Music)
"Contesting the Performance of Pre-eminence"
Co-Sponsored by the Institute of Musical Research, and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research.
Friday 3 February, 2pm-6pm
Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, London WC1 B3
A symposium bringing together scholars and creative practitioners in performance, music, and critical spatial practice addressing borders in Canada, Palestine, and the UK.
Speakers to include: Rachel Beckles Willson, Yara El-Ghadban, Jonathan Holmes, Alison Jeffers, Annie Pfingst, and Dylan Robinson.
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