From the Wall to the Sea: The Translocal Politics of (Anti-)Apartheid with Charles Heller (Border Forensics) and Nandita Sharma

While the recognition of the Israeli occupation as forming an apartheid regime across Palestine has gained momentum recently, the concept of apartheid has also been mobilised to describe the global (im)mobility regime which allocates differential rights to move and stay according to a subject’s position within a matrix of citizenship, race, class and gender. How do these distinct formations of separation relate to each other? How can we not only compare but connect different practices of separation that operate across scales - and resistance to them? How can struggles against apartheid be transformed by their translocal connections? Drawing on the analysis of border violence across the Mediterranean frontier generated within the Forensic Oceanography project over the last 10 years, as well as from the newly formed Border Forensics project, Charles Heller will probe these questions.

After the talk, Charles will be joined in conversation by Nandita Sharma, an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements. Nandita is Professor of the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Charles and Nandita will discuss the ongoing struggle for planetary commons, life in relation, and future otherwise taking place in the ruins of multiscalar bordering regimes.

This event is in collaboration with the School of Architecture's PhD programme.

Register to attend via Zoom

Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Carrying the common wind of last year’s Co-liberation series, this year we look to inhabit and  expand the idea of “Re-possession”.

We see possession as relating to oneself and one's place. It is both material and ethereal. It can be reclaimed and reoriented. In the spirit of social movements that seek to both take back and push forward, we refer to repossession as the struggle for an emancipated ownership: an object, state or practice of (re)produced belonging, felt as equally outward and inward, reciprocally individual and collective. It is a challenge to property : permeable and responsive to both belonging and unbelonging.

Over the course of the series we will reach into and out from the earth and the body. We will begin by excavating the relationships between geological, decolonial, and architectural practices, before exploring corporeal acts and atmospheres, somatic limitations and horizons, and the embodiment and enactment of emancipated selves and spaces. We will trace the lines that are drawn to oppress, extract and eliminate, but we will also outline the interdependencies that can unsettle colonial logic.

With these discussions we seek a practice that can harness the moments and movements that both shape space and strengthen struggle. We also nurture an intentional community, situated in the affordances of now and grasping towards a possible future. By mapping emancipatory routes between ground and horizon, we aim to “get to the heart of the matter” : to stretch out and open up where it meets, holds, and forms us, and to foreground the ideas and artefacts that build memory, militancy, solidarity, imagination, and action otherwise.