Date: April 16, 2019
Location: NYU – Abu Dhabi
Claudia Pena
UCLA
Migration and Trauma
Historically, migration from Latin America to the Mexican/US border generally revolved around young men looking for work. In the past decade, and more so in the last few years, we’ve seen more women and children making the trek. They seek opportunity and safety,
both needs resulting from US foreign policy effecting unstable conditions in their home countries. The migrant caravan of 2018-19 consists of at least 5,000 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. Though the destination is the United States, most have been in Tijuana, Mexico awaiting their turn to make their asylum claim. Meanwhile, they depend on the altruism of the locals and generosity of NGO’s. My work focuses on trauma informed lawyering. I’ve conducted trainings to ensure attorneys offering migrants legal services are properly prepared to minimize the re-traumatization of those seeking asylum and also to limit their own vicarious trauma as they bear witness to the often harrowing testimonies. I will discuss a bit about about this work and some of the narratives migrants have shared with me.
Debora Spini
New York University, Florence
Migratory violence
My paper will explore the different forms of violence experienced by migrating women, with a special, although not exclusive, focus on European political discourses. My paper will analyse how migrant women are represented in European social imaginaries as “victims”,
deprived of voice and agency and in need of “salvation”; many myths and assumption focus on their bodies and their sexuality. My paper will define this representations as examples of symbolic violence, to be matched with the reality of phenomena of massive structural violence as it is made evident in the new forms of slavery such as trafficking and forced sexual labour.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Princeton University
A Conflicted Terrain: Visualizing War, Imagining Nation
2019 marks the ten year anniversary of the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. This paper examines the legacies of this war and its dislocation in the work of Sri Lankan artists and writers both as a subject and a catalyst for the development of new artistic trends. Drawing on the art works and the personal stories of these artists, my paper will reflect on the narrativization of war in multiple spheres and its continued significance in constructions of Sri Lankanness, at home and abroad.
