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Circular Movements: Writing Anti-colonial Mediterranean Futures from Athens
07 February 2023, 4:30 pm–6:00 pm
SPRC Colloquium with Tom Western (UCL, Geography)
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All | UCL staff | UCL students
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Sarah Parker Remond Centre
Location
-
IAS Common GroundG11, Ground Floor, South Wing, Wilkins BuildingUCL, Gower Street, LondonWC1E 6BT
I am currently writing a book titled Circular Movements: Migratory Citizenships in Athens. The book focuses on how movements move: how activisms travel, circulate, migrate; how citizenship struggles shuttle from place to place; how resistances resonate across radical trajectories. It tells of how new Athenian publics creatively contest the racialized logics of borders and citizenship regimes, and remake urban space through relational geographies and anticolonial imaginations. Athens – the city so often claimed as Euro-civilizational origin point and symbol of superiority – is remade here as an Eastern Mediterranean city, a city that contains other cities, that contains multiple and migratory citizenships.
The book draws new cartographies based on circular movements. The result is a transformation of Mediterranean migrations, citizenships, and questions of spatial justice.
About the Speaker
Dr Tom Western
Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at UCL Dept of Geography
My teaching and research centre on movements and migrations, cities and citizenships, relations and imaginations, activisms and anticolonialisms – usually working with methods that foreground sound and voice. I work primarily in Athens, Greece, where I study and contribute to migratory activisms and creative citizenship movements. I am a member of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF), with whom I run the Active Citizens Sound Archive – a space for amplifying citizenship work, youth activism, community mobilising, and collective research and knowledge production. I am also a member of the ‘Memory – Monuments’ working group of Decolonize Hellas, developing anticolonial approaches to culture, history, and questions of citizenship in the Greek context.
More about Dr Tom Western