PoD#2: Jordana Silverstein - "Economies of Emotion: Constructing & Imagining the figure of the Child Refugee in Australian political discourse"

Jordana Silverstein (University of Melbourne)

Please join us for PoD#2: Tuesday 14th March, 6PM @ RMIT City Campus

“Economies of Emotion: Constructing and Imagining the figure of the Child Refugee in Australian political discourse”

Jordana Silverstein (Melbourne University)

ABSTRACT:

The treatment of child refugees in Australian political discourse and practice has been replete with discourses of emotion. In this paper I will focus on the last five or so years of political discourse in order to examine two twinned schemas: the ways in which the category of the child refugee or asylum seeker is produced, and the ways that ideas of the Australian nation are produced, through emotional discourses, or economies of emotion. I am interested here in asking what emotional work these narratives about child refugees do in the national imagination. Both the category of the child refugee/asylum seeker, and that of the nation, are not natural: they are historical productions, built through multivalent, multilingual discourses and practices. They are forms of creating difference amongst populations in society. Through a focus on these recent discourses, I will explore the specific ways in which these emotional economies function, and work to understand the systems of ideas and relations that they produce, as well as the different ways that child refugees and asylum seekers have utilised emotional discourses to resist their categorisation by Australian political forces.

BIO: 

Jordana Silverstein is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne, working as part of the ARC Laureate Research Fellowship Project ‘Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism, 1920 to the Present’. She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn, 2015) and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016), and has been widely published, including in Cultural Studies Review, History Australia, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Overland and New Matilda. 

WHEN:

6pm – 7:30pm, Tuesday 14th March 2017

WHERE:

Building 9, Room 9.1.024

RMIT City Campus (cnr Bowen & Franklin)

ABOUT:

The Philosophies of Difference group (PoD) is a Melbourne based group of scholars working continental philosophy and interested in problems that have been marginal to the dominant traditions of Western thought. We engage with approaches including: critical philosophy of race, decolonial thought, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, philosophy of disability, philosophy of nature, queer theory, and trans philosophy. We especially welcome participation from women, people of colour, and other minority groups.

The PoD Seminar Series #3 is supported by the Communication, Politics and Culture Research Centre