Decolonizing Research: Ethics, Methodologies, and Positionality

Dr. Small will give a presentation on the following information:

"This presentation offers an overview of the contemporary border governance policies underpinning the UK detention regime represented in the Refugee Tales and others like it, through the lens of Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian’s Manus Prison Theory (Boochani 2023; Tofighian 2020). Developed during Boochani’s incarceration in an Australian offshore asylum detention on Manus Island, the theory emerged alongside the composition of his literary work, No Friend but the Mountains (2019). It proposes a critical vocabulary for analysing the violence of border regimes, informed by “refugitude”—a mode of knowledge production grounded in the political and epistemic positionality of the refugee (Um 2015). In particular, I will consider how Boochani’s conceptualisation of the “kyriarchal system”—rooted in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s “kyriarchy” (2005) and referring to the intersecting layers of domination and oppression that operate within the “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) of border regimes—may illuminate transnational tendencies in border governance and provide insight into forms of resistance across geopolitical contexts."

Marina Tziara will present on the following topic:

"On Black Study, Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination" . Working (from an artistic/sociologic research spectrum) towards the sociogenic principal of Fanon-Wynter , the reenchanted humanism, the idea of non self and my personal research on Wynterian theories regarding post human identities and how we break the bias of phylogeny, ontogeny with art, in order to create new humans free from race, species, sex and so on. (Giving humans a different future -McKittrick /Wynter)."

Hanna Aicart holds a double degree in Biology and Religion and Culture from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, and pursued graduate studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Before moving to France in 2017, she worked as a teacher and at the Royal Ontario Museum and Ontario Science Centre. She is currently a PhD candidate at ILCEA4, Université Grenoble Alpes, where her research, supervised by Pierre-Alexandre Beylier, focuses on Canada’s negotiation with and resistance to contemporary right-wing American populist culture.

 Kalpana Jha is a PhD Candidate in Public Administration at the University of Victoria and a Fellow with the Borders in Globalization Lab. Her research explores what happens when international borders meet everyday life. Kalpana’s interest goes beyond how communities live within borders; she re-centers communities to understand how communities participate in making the border itself. Focusing on transboundary networks along the Nepal–India border, she examines how people, rivers, kinship, gender, and community relationships move across and sometimes challenge the territorial boundaries imposed by states. Her research interests include critical border studies and human mobility, feminist theory, environmental governance, and decolonial community-engaged research. She has over a decade of experience working on transboundary communities, social justice, inclusion, human rights, and community environmental governance across Nepal, India, and Canada.

Jessica Small is a researcher at ILCEA4, Université Grenoble Alpes, where she is a member of the LISCA research group. Her research focuses on contemporary refugee literature, border crossing and migration, examining in particular the narratives and power structures surrounding asylum, hospitality and border regimes.

Marina Tziara is a Greek multidisciplinary artist and writer based in France. Working across sculpture, painting, text and participatory practices, her work explores collective memory, identity, the body and transformation through posthuman and surrealist perspectives. Her recent research engages with questions of gender, race and posthuman identities, including through her project On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination.

Supported by the GATES project (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS), funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030