Metaphors of Migration
This talk considers the dilemmas of representing contemporary migration in discourses of national security, humanitarianism, migrant activism, and the arts. Whether as foreign threat or suffering victim, the state produces "the migrant" as the limit of national sovereignty, social order, and liberal personhood, even as it seeks to translate the “migrant" into the “immigrant" through regimes of visibility, legality, and temporality in the political sphere, laying claim to migrant labor in the economic sphere, and subjecting what remains to humanist concepts of free will and autonomy. Activist projects and aesthetic works offer other vocabularies with which to represent migration,and other means to frame the political beyond normative ideas of citizenship in the nation-state.

Interface 2019 is a conference organized by the graduate students in the Cultural Mediations PhD program in The Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture (ICSLAC).
(Un)bound: Interdisciplinary Dialogues to be held on May 3rd and 4th at Carleton University, located on unceded Algonquin territory (Ottawa).