'Growing together. The more we are, the stronger we are' is the title of a recent European Commission promotional video designed to send youngsters in member countries the message that unity is strength. Yet, it does so by showing an extremely orientalist version of the EU.
Twenty four participants took part in the workshop on ‘Performance and Political Subjectivity’ held on 9 February 2012 as part of Oecumene’s First Symposium.
Held on the last day of the Oecumene project's First Symposium, the workshop entitled 'Religious organisation and the political articulation of citizenship', explored many relevant and current issues concerning the involvement of religion in the public sphere. The workshop underscored the need for an inclusive cross-regional academic dialogue on this subject.
The workshop Sexual Democracy, Imperialism and Cultural Translation opened up a rich and intense exchange about sexuality, citizenship, political liberalism, orientalism and political subjectivity.
I'm just back from an exhilarating two-days at the ‘Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship’ conference, hosted by the Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism research project, at The Open University.
Academics, auditors, entrepreneurs, footballers, investors, journalists, lawyers and managers move as professionals through distinct but overlapping fields (of expertise, knowledge, and competence) that traverse national borders.
The decorations are up and the tree is full of colours. More than thirty children have adorned it with painted dried flowers and scraps of paper carrying their wishes for the future. The star does not appear on top, but hangs from one of the tallest branches of the small palm tree that was chosen as a Christmas insignia in the protest camp of Jobat.
With children gathering under the trees for their morning classes, a handful of men cooking food on the fire and other villagers farming in the fields behind the green tent in which I write, it is easy to forget that I am in the heart of a struggle. But I am.
When thinking about the Oecumene project, I reflect on what binds us together and what separates us in terms of our experiences of citizenship around the world. In my last blog, I wrote about the shared experience of statelessness, which has regrettably become a truly global case study for exploring how the absence of citizenship affects people. This time, I’d like to share some thoughts on another common or shared experience relating to citizenship, which caught my attention thanks to a recent decision of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. It would seem that, whether we are perusing international legal standards or delving into the domestic citizenship law of any state picked at random, one notion emerges as a uniting principle: the best interests of the child.
With an estimated 1.9 to 3.8 million ‘illegal’ immigrants in the EU and continued evidence of official breaches of non-discrimination laws, it is reasonable to ask: What is ‘illegality” in this context. I will answer by looking at the concept of ‘illegality’ from a historical perspective, as an actively produced condition and as a stake.
State sovereignty in determining nationality legislation has led to a number of difficulties worldwide, including the lack safeguards against statelessness, and often discriminatory policies. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, a substantially apparent flaw in state citizenship legislation is gender discrimination. Women rarely possess the right to pass nationality on to their children or their spouse – and maternal affiliation can only be the case in extreme circumstances. This leaves the acquisition of citizenship dependent on the male figures in the family. Individuals who have often lived all their lives within the country of their mother - and cannot leave - are unable to acquire her nationality. This situation is not only impractical, it also leaves thousands of people at risk of being born stateless.
A week ago, I was breathlessly following news of the attack by hundreds of Egyptian people on the Israeli embassy in Cairo. This event – one of great popular rage – stemmed from both the long-term conflictual history of Egypt-Israel relations and short-term outrage over the killing of five Egyptian soldiers by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) a few weeks ago.
It may seem bizarre that from its beginnings in March 2011, ‘Democracia Real Ya’ (DRY) – ’Real Democracy Now’ – could burst so dramatically into the public sphere with a series of demonstrations all across Spain.
Unlike Gypsies, Jews, Nubians, Bedouins, Shi'a or Baha'is in Egypt, Copts are not a small minority of citizens that live in a particular part of the country or use a different dialect. Copts represent, according to unofficial estimations, 10-15% of the total population in Egypt. The real number of Copts is known but treated as a military secret and is not disclosed.
At the heart of the exploration underway within the Oecumene project lies the concept of citizenship. Whether described in terms of membership or of participation, citizenship reflects some form of belonging, contributing to the drawing of dividing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Following decades of civil war, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 provided southern Sudanese with the opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination by way of a referendum. In January 2011, voters overwhelmingly supported the call for secession from Sudan.
In the last years two photographers, Edu Leon and Olmo Calvo, have been developing a project called Fronteras invisibles or invisible borders. Despite increasing obstacles created by the police when taking pictures, this project is still active with the aim of exposing the reality of identity checks and police raids in Madrid (Spain). These controls are carried out to identify, arrest, and in some cases, imprison in detention centers all those ‘foreigners’ who, for whatever reason, lack the immigration documents.
With more than 150 paintings and sculptures, the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich has just hosted one of the largest recent exhibitions on Orientalist art, organised jointly with the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (where the event was on until 9 January 2011): “Orientalism in Europe: From Delacroix to Kandinsky”. Almost at the same time, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris dedicated an entire show to the contested work of the Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose images of the desert had a relevant place in Munich as well.
As millions will have filled in the indomitable lilac census questionnaire in the UK we should ask ourselves what “tomorrow” are we helping to “shape”? The primary use of the Census is stated as assisting various levels of government to provide key services. It will also undoubtedly be a goldmine for other quantitative researchers.
For at least two centuries the origins of citizenship appeared European. It is essentially considered a Judeo-Christian development and it is juxtaposed against its ‘lack’ in Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Hinduism (if one thinks along religious terms) or Asia, America and Africa (if one thinks along geographic terms).
Engin Isin explores the meaning of the word Oecumene and how it relates to the content of the project. The meaning of this classical Greek word is somehow ambiguous which makes it all the more interesting and challenging for our project.
Is the visual political? The question has long preoccupied those who work in the field of visual culture. After all, as Barthes told us, photographs carry studium, but it is only the rare ones with punctum that make us stop and take note.
Official multiculturalism has meant that we tolerate diversity so long as we can safely consume and/or inhabit it; so long as pleasure in difference continues without consequence to either the ‘majority’ values or marketable cultures.
Media frames are representations of reality. Their resemblance to reality is always partial. They emerge through institutionalised journalism practices that favour certain stories over others and influence the language and images used to describe events. [1]
In this podcast I introduce the Oecumene project and outline its broad aims. You can find a more detailed text podcast script attached if you would like to read rather than watch.
More may have been written about the explosion of politics in Arab worlds in the past two weeks than about 1848 in the last hundred and sixty years. I will leave proving this hypothesis to Google Books executives and their calculators who have developed a penchant for quantifying knowledge. If true, what does it say about the overaccumulation crisis of words? Do we say too much?
There is no image that symbolizes nationalism more poignantly than the flag. In this photograph I took in Toronto during the 2002 World Cup a number of fans were celebrating the victory of their ‘nation’. There has been so much discussion about whether nationality is an immutable identity or an identity that is internalized and enacted.
12-13 November 2012, London, UK
What images of citizenship are emerging in relation to the processes of decolonization and deorientalization? Keynote speakers Saba Mahmood and Walter Mignolo together with a selection of panellists will address this question from multi-disciplinary perspectives.
To register for the Oecumene website is easy, just complete the registration form and tell us a bit about yourself. Once your account is approved, you can start a discussion, comment in the blog and update your public profile page.
Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism is funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (Institutions, values, beliefs and behaviour ERC-AG-SH2).