Refuge in a Moving World Workshop: Hannah Arendt's 'We Refugees'

As part of the Refuge in a Moving World research network, we will be organising a series of text-based workshops looking at writing that gives a historical perspective to issues raised by the current refugee crisis and the language it deploys. The first of these will take place in the Institute of Advanced Studies Common Ground on 10 March from 1 to 3 pm. Do feel free to bring your lunch along. This is an informal workshop and we hope that everyone attending will be willing to participate.

The text we will be considering is Hannah Arendt's essay 'We Refugees'. The workshop will be led by John Wolfe Ackerman.  Dr Ackerman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Kent Law School. He received his PhD in Political Theory from Northwestern University and is currently completing a book in which he reads Hannah Arendt's political thought through the lens of a German-Jewish political theology. 

In 1943, Hannah Arendt published a short text called 'We Refugees' in the American Menorah Journal. It addressed the status of Jewish refugees in the US like herself: foreshadowing themes in the later works for which Arendt was to become known, including her understanding of politics as the dimension of existence in which difference is encountered (and taking up lines of earlier research into German antisemitism that she had yet to publish), Arendt's article made the case for accepting and affirming the collective refugee status of these new arrivals as the basis for a (Jewish) politics, emphatically rejecting the assimilation that was, in Arendt's view, being frantically pursued by refugee and native alike. This text has attracted particular attention from Giorgio Agamben (in the early 1990s, in the face of refugee flows in eastern and southern Europe), and again today. It offers a challenge to current responses to the present refugee crisis, to nation-state modes of organisation that are today being shored up once again, to understandings of what it means to belong to a 'people' - above all, to the continuing failure to encounter refugees politically and to imagine that the refugees' status could be a political (rather than a merely legal or humanitarian) one. 

Participants will be provided with a copy of the text when they register, and are asked to read it prior to the workshop and bring along discussion points, questions and comments.

The 'Refuge in a Moving World' network is an initiative of the Institute of Advanced Studies in collaboration with the Institute for Global Prosperity.