The Poetics of Togetherness: Long-term asylum-seekers Organizing

Keywords: refugees, conviviality, migrants' activism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

This paper examines the political possibilities opened up by ordinary human connections on the margins. It draws on three years of participant-observation with a group of long-term asylum-seekers in Hong Kong who organized themselves as autonomous political agents rather than aid recipients. Building on migration scholars’ engagement with the concept of conviviality and Glissant's "Poetics of Relation", I develop the notion of “poetics of togetherness” to capture asylum-seekers’ vitality as social and political agents actively defying the isolation and dehumanization that borderization imposes. The ethnography focuses on the micro-practices of everyday life that generate interconnectedness and a sense of intimacy in these asylum-seekers spatial, temporal, and existential displacements. If being on the margins is defined by a sense of non-belonging and isolation, then these small ways of being in the world are acts of refusal and disavowal of the structures of exclusion and subjugation.