Update on Haiti

Haiti Water and Sanitation Update

Water Station in Belloc, Haiti

Over the Spring break Dr. Mimi Sheller traveled to Haiti to present a final report on the NSF-Rapid research conducted in 2010 with professors Franco Montalto, Patrick Gurian and Michael Piasecki on post-earthquake water and sanitation reconstruction in Leogane. We held a meeting of the community groups who had participated in our 2010 Workshop and presented them with a final report translated into Kreyol, as well as giving a presentation and answering their questions. An English version of the report is available here: Final HAITI Report

We are also pleased to have published an article on “Women’s Water and Sanitation Needs in Post-earthquake Leogane, Haiti” in the online journal wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water, Vol 2., No. 1. The article can be found here: http://issuu.com/wh2ojournal/docs/vol2_no2. wH2O is a new initiative at the University of Pennsylvania that publishes an annual online, open-access academic journal and blog focused on gender and water/sanitation issues worldwide. Dr. Sheller will also be presenting this work at the April 9th Conference of the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative on Gender and Water: Leading Beyond the Burden. Information on the conference can be found at
http://pgwiconference2013.wordpress.com/

Flooded farmland around Lake Enriquillo

Finally, Dr. Sheller also began work on a new NSF-RAPID project with colleagues at CCNY (see an overview at http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/news/spring-break-lake-enriquillo.cfm). The project, RAPID: Understanding Sudden Hydro-Climatic Changes and Exploring Sustainable Solutions in the Enriquillo Closed Water Basin (Southwest Hispaniola), Award #1264466, seeks to understand the causes for, impact of, and potential mitigation strategies in response to the rising water levels of two lakes on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic which have submerged farmland, houses, roads, and are threatening entire towns. Dr. Sheller conducted 35 interviews on the social and economic impacts of the flooding with local inhabitants and leaders in affected areas of Haiti (La Source, Fonds Parisien) and the Dominican Republic (Boca de Cachon, Jimani, Discubierta).

Fore more information please contact: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

Mobilities New Issue

Mobilities, Vol. 8, No. 1, 01 Feb 2013

Available on Taylor & Francis Online

Special Issue: Borders and Mobilities

This new issue contains the following articles:

Articles
Borders and Mobilities: Introduction to the Special Issue
Tim Richardson
Pages: 1-6
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747747

To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and the Assemblage of Circulation
Mark B. Salter
Pages: 7-19
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747779

Governmobility: The Powers of Mobility
Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt
Pages: 20-34
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747754

Mobility Regimes and Borderwork in the European Community
Anne Jensen
Pages: 35-51
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747780

Mapping the Contours of Mobilities Regimes. Air Travel and Drug Smuggling Between the Caribbean and the Netherlands
Sanneke Kloppenburg
Pages: 52-69
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747766

Through Metal Fences: Material Mobility and the Politics of Transnationality at Borders
Malini Sur
Pages: 70-89
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747778

Rebordering France and Denmark Narratives and Practices of Border-Construction in Two European Countries
SARAH SCUZZARELLO & CATARINA KINNVALL
Pages: 90-106
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747775

Monumentalising the Border: Bordering Through Connectivity
Anthony Cooper & Chris Rumford
Pages: 107-124
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747761

Conflict’s Tools. Borders, Boundaries and Mobility in Jerusalem’s Spatial Structures☆
Wendy Pullan
Pages: 125-147
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.750040

Towards a Cosmopolitan Cinema: Understanding the Connection Between Borders, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction Film
Maria Rovisco
Pages: 148-165
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.747774

Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan

Mobilities Visiting Speakers:

Lonnie Van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, April 21st, 12:30-2pm

MacAlister Hall, Suite 4020 (CoAS Dean’s Conference Room)

Film-makers to speak at Drexel, followed by a Film Screening at 7pm at the Ibrahim Theatre, International House

Migration: Artistic Formations – Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan

Migration plays a significant role in the development of numerous modern artistic ideas and representations. This series examines the changing movements that transplant artists from one culture to another, intensifying migratory distinctions, and sharpening the conception of the creative role of displacement and estrangement within modern art.

Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan in person. Introduced by Professor Mimi Sheller, Director, Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University.

Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers

dir. Lonnie van Brummelen in collaboration with Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands, 2007, 16mm, 63 mins, color, silent

Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers explores subsidized economy, the globalized sugar market, and how artistic practice can disrupt and reverse economic policies. Upon the discovery of anti-competitive policies set by the European Union to protect its native sugar production, and the detrimental impact of this on other countries, van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan staged an intervention. Their goal was to work around EU restrictions on sugar importation by turning European sugar dumped into Nigeria into sculptures, and returning it as an artistic product: a Monument of Sugar.

Grossraum (Borders of Europe)

dir. Lonnie van Brummelen in collaboration with Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands, 2004-2005, 35mm, 35 mins, color, silent

Grossraum is a “triptych” filmed along three sensitive crossing points on the European Union border: Hrebenne, a border post between Ukraine and Poland; the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco; and the green zone which splits Cyprus in two. By directing our gaze to the demarcations of the geopolitical “greater area” or “Grossraum” of the European Union, van Brummelen reveals the paradox of a zone of freedom whose development is dependent on the strength and policing of its borders.

For more info contact:

Mimi Sheller

Center for Mobilities Research and Policy

Drexel University

mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

 

Robert E. Cargni

Program Curator, Film

Ibrahim Theater @ International House

CIRCULATION INTERRUPTED: WALLS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting Program Details

Session Information: Program Number: 4-0765

Type: Invited Session

Session Sponsor: AAA Executive Program Committee

Session Date/Time: Saturday, November 20th, 2010, 1:45 PM-5:30 PM

Graffitti on a A Wall in Haiti

Organizer(s): FARHA GHANNAM (Swarthmore College), MIGUEL DIAZ-BARRIGA (University Texas-Pan American), ANNE MENELEY (Trent University)

Chair(s): MIGUEL DIAZ-BARRIGA (University Texas-Pan American), ANNE MENELEY (Trent University)

Participants:

1:45 PM: INTRODUCTION: ANNE MENELEY (Trent University)

2:00 PM: JOSIAH HEYMAN (University of Texas-El Paso) — Unequal Mobility in the U.S. Borderlands With Mexico: A Synthesis

2:15 PM: AMAHL BISHARA (Tufts University) — The Wall Has Two Sides: Two Kinds of Palestinians

2:30 PM: GILBERTO ROSAS (University of Illinois) — Delinquent Refusals and the Criminal Abandonments of the New Frontier

2:45 PM: KAROLINA SZMAGALSKA-FOLLIS (National University of Maynooth) — Tense Interventions: Towards an Ethnography of Pragmatism

3:00 PM: FARHA GHANNAM (Swarthmore College) — On the Meaning of Walls: Comparative Perspectives on Gated Communities

3:15 PM: DISCUSSANT: GREGORY STARRETT (University of North Carolina-Charlotte)

3:30 PM: MIMI SHELLER — Open Skies and Closed Borders: The Production of Airports as “Soft Walls” on the US-Caribbean Border

3:45 PM: ROCIO MAGANA (Rutgers University) — Border-Crossing Vortex: Migrant Abandonment and Strategic Risk in the Deserts of the American Southwest.

4:00 PM: ANDRE GINGRICH (University of Vienna) — New Borders in Southern Arabia

4:15 PM: MARGARET DORSEY (University Texas Pan American) — Border Wall Mobilities: Circulations of Necro-Citizenship on the U.S.-Mexican Border I

4:30 PM: MIGUEL DIAZ-BARRIGA (University Texas-Pan American) — Border Wall Mobilities: Circulations of Necro-Citizenship on the U.S.-Mexican Border II

4:45 PM: JULIE PETEET (University of Louisville) — Circulation and Walled Countries

5:00 PM: DISCUSSANT: ALEJANDRO LUGO (University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign)

5:15 PM: DISCUSSION

5:30 PM: End of Session

Mobilities Visiting Speaker: Cati Coe

Children’s (Im)mobilities: The Effects of Transnational Migration on Children’s Circulation in Ghanaian Households

The Center for Mobilities Research and Policy will host a lecture by Dr. Cati Coe as part of the Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series, on Monday, November 8, 2010 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Paul Peck Alumni Center (32nd and Market Streets).

In Ghana, children, like adults, are often mobile, visiting a variety of different households and changing their residence often. As in the Caribbean, many children live with adults other than their parents, such as with a grandmother, uncle or family friend. Often, children move from poorer to richer households in situations sometimes seen as mutually beneficial and at other times as exploitative. International migration of parents and other relatives, however, changes children’s patterns of mobility. Despite their wealth relative to their relations back in Ghana, international migrants are more likely to leave behind or send back their children to live with relatives than to bring their relatives’ children to live with them, as would be expected. This lecture explores the residential mobility of children vis-a-vis adults; how their residential mobility is linked to their relative status, power and relationships and what such mobility or immobility means in how the joys and costs of raising children are distributed between households and across the globe.

Cati Coe, associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Camden,  has written on children and Ghana and examined how children understand nationalist projects, as presented in school. She has also published The Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools, Nationalism, Youth and the Transformation of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Her latest project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, explores the effects of international migration on Ghanaian family life. Coe has been involved in editing two collections on the topic of children, youth and international migration to be coming out this year.

The Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series is a forum for leading scholars invited by the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy to present new research in the fields of mobilities research, tourism studies, migration and border studies, mobile communications, new mobile media and related interdisciplinary areas.This lecture is open to the entire Drexel community and invited guests from the region. Refreshments will be served. For more information, email Dr. Mimi Sheller at mimi.sheller@drexel.edu.

 

Anthropology and Mobilities

Anthropology and Mobility

Call for a new boundary-crossing network

Convenor: Noel B. Salazar

Modern Nomad in Mongolia

Mobility, as a concept-metaphor, captures the common impression that people’s life-worlds are in constant flux, with not only persons (including anthropologists), but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. Among anthropologists, it is fashionable these days to study tourism, migration, diaspora, and exile; cosmopolitanism and transnationalism; global markets and commodity chains; and global information and communication technologies, media, and popular culture. The literature is replete with metaphorical conceptualizations attempting to describe perceived altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and scapes; time–space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the network society and its space of flows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. The interest in mobility goes hand in hand with theoretical approaches that reject a sedentarist metaphysics in favour of a nomadic one and empirical studies on diverse mobilities, questioning taken-for-granted correspondences between peoples, places, and cultures.

While anthropologists traditionally tended to ignore or regard border-crossing movements as deviations from normative place-bound communities, cultural homogeneity, and social integration, the discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism of the 1990s shifted the pendulum in the opposite direction, mobility often being promoted as normality, and (too much) place attachment a digression or resistance against globalizing forces. At the same time, critically engaged anthropologists were among the first to point out that not all mobilities are valued equally positively and that the very processes and regimes that produce trans-border movements also result in geographical and social immobility.

This new scholarly network aims to facilitate theoretical and methodological exchanges on anthropology and mobility. What is the analytical purchase of (im)mobility as a conceptual framework to study and understand the current human condition? What are the most adequate methods to research objects of study “on the move”? The network will not only foster intellectually stimulating debates among anthropologists working on mobility along various thematic and conceptual lines, but will also create exciting opportunities for collaborative research and publications.

We kindly invite everyone interested to attend our first network meeting, which will be held during the 11th EASA Biennial Conference in Maynooth, Ireland (24-27th August). The meeting will take place on Wednesday, 25 August, from 20.00 until 21.30. The exact location will be announced at the conference through flyers (
http://www.easaonline.org/
).

Those who want to express their interest in joining the network may contact:
Noel B. Salazar, Ph.D.
Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe)
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615, BE-3000 Leuven
Noel.Salazar@soc.kuleuven.be

International Cafe

International Cafe Feb. 17th

Mimi Sheller will be speaking on “Re-thinking Our Connections With the Caribbean” in the International Cafe on Wednesday, Feb. 17th, 2010, 12:30-1:30 pm. This informal discussion event for anyone interested in International Area Studies will be held in MacAlister 2019/2020. Professor Sheller will discuss her work on the Caribbean, and the many ways in which those of us living in the USA are connected with the region, even if we do not realize it. This includes our connections via tourism and the images it circulates; offshore banking and its role in the circulation of money; the drugs trade and the war on drugs; the consumption of goods like bananas, coffee, bauxite and oil; and — especially important at the moment — our relation to political and humanitarian interventions in the region such as the current crisis in Haiti. The talk will focus on how we might improve our relations in each of these areas via better knowledge of the history that connects us, for better or for worse.

International Cafe is a monthly forum sponsored by International Area Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences that provides globally themed discussions that are open to the entire Drexel community. The Cafe discusses contemporary issues, presented with scholarly research that has an international component. We invite you to share ideas and experiences in this unique yet informal setting. Refreshments will be served.

For more information about this free event, please contact Jacqueline Rios at jsr62@drexel.edu.

US-Mexico Border Wall

Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series

Thursday 18^th February 2010,  4-6 pm

PSA Building (33rd & Powelton) Rm.114, Drexel University

Border Walls and Necro-citizenship: the Normalization of Exclusion and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Professor Miguel Diaz-Barriga (Swarthmore College)

and Dr. Margaret Dorsey (University of Texas, Pan-American)

The anthropology of circulation calls for both a critical reexamination of anthropological conceptions of flows and mobilities and a wider consideration of the walls and barriers (including technological) that constrain the movement of specific types of people, goods, and information. This paper–based on a National Science Foundation-funded ethnographic study of the wall being built on the US-Mexico border–provides an overall framework for understanding the construction of border walls and the concomitant militarization of borders, as demarcating zones for the practice of necro-power and necro-citizenship.  Scholars developed the concept of necro-power to describe structures of governance and governmentality through which state actors and structures exercise power primarily through exclusion, violence, and death.  Border walls in the United States demarcate such zones where exclusion and death are normalized.  We expand this analysis by looking at how these zones of necro-power transform border residents into necro-citizens. This paper, through an analysis of the construction of the border wall in South Texas, explores the usefulness of the concept of necro-citizenship to understand both the production of citizenship in South Texas and local resistance to the border wall.  We conclude by asking if anthropologists can use this model to explore wider possibilities for understanding border walls throughout the world as zones of necro-power and necro-citizenship.

The Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series is a forum for leading scholars invited by the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy to present new research in the fields of mobilities research, tourism studies, migration and border studies, mobile communications, new mobile media, and related interdisciplinary areas. The talks are open to the entire Drexel community and invited guests from the region. Refreshments will be served. For more information about this free event, please contact Mimi Sheller at mimi.sheller@drexel.edu.

mCenter@basekamp with Electronic Disturbance Theater & Breadboard

Join the mCenter at Basekamp’s  Potluck-Skype Chat, Tuesday, Dec. 15th, 6-8 pm – in person, or on Skype name: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck in person, be sure to bring a dish (basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa)

This week we’ll be discussing border disturbance art, inter-American mobilities, and mobile technology with Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll of Electronic Disturbance Theater / b.a.n.g lab, from 6-7pm; followed from 7-8pm by a continuing discussion with Mimi Sheller, director of the new Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University, and Dan Schimmel, director of Breadboard.

Transborder Migrant Tool

The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) developed the first Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. The group’s recent project *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS cellphone safety/poetry net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border) – with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Ricardo Dominguez – was the winner of the “Transnational Communities Award” funded by *Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico – U.S.  and CALIT2, and was also awarded two Transborder Intervention awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities. Project URL:
http://bang.calit2.net/xborder

Joining the conversation by Skype will be: Ricardo Dominguez, Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California San Diego, Hellman Fellow, Co-Chair of the gallery@calit2, Co-Principal Investigator of the Transborder Project, and a board member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics; and,

Amy Sara Carroll, poet, member of Electronic Disturbance Theater, and Assistant Professor in the Program in American Culture at University of Michigan, and affiliate of the Center for World performance Studies and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, with interests in Latin/o American performance and alternative cultural production critical theory, poetry, cultural studies and inter-American Studies.

Joining the conversation in person will be Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Director of the mCenter, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University (UK), and founding co-editor of the international journal Mobilities.  Also joining the conversation in person will be Dan Schimmel, artist, Director of the Esther Klein Gallery (EKG) at the University City Science Center, and Director of Breadboard. Breadboard is a hybrid program at the University City Science Center that facilitates cross-disciplinary art exhibits, community outreach initiatives and special programs offering public access to a new generation of fabrication technology and workspace in an effort to empower individuals and convene communities around creative applications of technology. Through a unique partnership with NextFab Studio Breadboard engages groups and communities at all levels of interest and experience. Breadboard programming combines 3-D printing technology, CAD-operated equipment such as laser cutters and milling machines with a collaborative workshop environment where artists, DIY enthusiasts, fabbers, hackers, community groups and students can share a computer station or a circuit board with business entrepreneurs, engineers, and industrial designers.

http://breadboardphilly.org/


http://www.facebook.com/breadboardphilly


http://twitter.com/bbphilly