Cross Border Sydney Blog

Governing International Students Forum

Join us for the fourth of the Cross Border Collective series of seminars on the theme of ‘Politics, Colonialism Borders’.

Thursday 13 December 2012. Doors open at 7pm. Entry is by coin donation.

This event will be a conversation between Sanmati Verma, Liz Thompson and Maria Elena Indelicato on the theme of international students and the border.

Sanmati Verma and Liz Thompson

With our politics wedded inextricably to the bureaucratic forms they seek to contest (“international students,” “refugees,” “guest workers”), we would like to try and decipher what has become of the cohort called “international students” after they fell out of focus following the dismantling of student pathways by the Gillard government from 2010 onwards. What we might say has not been glued together theoretically. All I can offer are a series of conjectures on what has become— what roles those formally on student visas now functionally play, what became of those subject to what Liz Thompson and Ben Rosenzweig in 2011 called ‘the expulsion,’ and what remains of those left in the permanently illegal spaces that the state strategically opened for them.

Sanmati Verma is a Melbourne-based migration lawyer, a member of the Anti-Deportation Working Group in Melbourne, and the founder of the International Student Legal Advice Clinic.

Liz Thompson is a Melbourne-based migration agent, a member of the Anti-Deportation Working Group in Melbourne and a communist who usually writes stuff with Ben.

Maria Elena Indelicato

“Racism has always combined claims based on continuity with the past with a present-oriented flexibility in defining the exact boundaries of these reified entities we call races or ethno-national-religious groupings.” (Wallerstein1991, p. 34) This quote brilliantly highlights the presence of the past in any historical manifestation of the nation-state, as well as implies a complementary relationship between the making of territorial borders and the making of social borders. “Asian” international students in Australia are a case in point as the conditions of their acceptance have greatly varied over the time in relation to successive understanding of what it takes to become “Australian”. In light of such reflection, I would like to explore with the other discussants the discursive shifts characterising the governing of international students throughout the several crises in the Australian export industry of international education.

Maria Elena Indelicato is an international PhD student at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. Her thesis approaches international students as a case of Australian border politics, and investigates the role played by emotions - such as resentment, anger and compassion - in shaping the governing management of international students in Australia, starting from the implementation of the Overseas Student Program in 1951.

About the seminar series

This seminar is the fourth in the cross-border collective’s monthly series of seminars on the theme of Politics, Colonialism, Borders. These seminars aim to bring together activists and academics to examine local and international movements and debates in order to develop a counter-politics of the border beyond the eradication of mandatory detention. In our view, any such political movement must confront and resist Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples.

If you would like to get involved in future seminars, please email Katie Hepworth (ketiairport at gmail.com) or Richard Bailey (rb2k at email.com).

Contesting Colonial Sovereignty: A seminar to discuss the Aboriginal Passport Ceremony

On 15 September 2012 a Welcome to Aboriginal Land Passport Ceremony will be held in Redfern (http://aboriginalpassportceremony.org/). Over 200 people, including newly arrived asylum seekers, will be issued with an Aboriginal Passport by Ray Jackson, President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association. The ceremony itself is an important and powerful disruption of settler colonialism and its assumptions of national sovereignty. It recognizes, furthermore, that indigenous sovereignty was never ceded. At the same time, the ceremony undermines the authority of state-issued passports as documents that finally determine questions of inclusion and exclusion. As the Ceremony organisers write, “the issuing of the Passports covers two important areas of interactions between the Traditional Owners of the Lands and migrants, asylum seekers and non-Aboriginal citizens of this country. Whilst they acknowledge our rights to all the Aboriginal Nations of Australia we reciprocate by welcoming them into our Nations. It is a moral win-win for all involved in the process”. 

This Seminar, one week after the event, will consider a range of issues raised by the ceremony, including the politics of sovereignty; whether a singular indigenous sovereignty is possible; as well as what alternative sovereignties might look like. The seminar will be chaired by Eve Vincent and will involve the following speakers:

Ray Jackson, President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association and long term activist who has been deeply involved in social movements for many years - from the Union movement through to deaths in custody and policing issues. 

Maria Giannacopolous, a lecturer in Socio-legal Studies and Criminal Justice at Flinders University. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the relations between law, justice and sovereignty with a specific emphasis on racialised communities (Indigenous peoples, refugees and migrants) in Australia.

Darren Parker, a Ngunnawal man, a graduate of University of Melbourne and currently a PhD student at the same university. On completion of this qualification he will be the first Aboriginal PhD graduate from Melbourne Law School. Darren has an interest in commercial law and in particular the social impact of law within our community and on the indigenous population in particular. 

This seminar is the third in the cross-border collective’s monthly series of seminars on the theme of Politics, Colonialism, Borders. These seminars aim to bring together activists and academics to examine local and international movements and debates in order to develop a counter-politics of the border. In our view, any such political movement must confront and resist Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples. If you would like to get involved in future seminars, please email Katie Hepworth (ketiairport at gmail.com) or Richard Bailey (rb2k at email.com). 

The CBC is a Sydney based group that has been working on projects around race, the border, migration and the state for around two years. In the past, the Cross Border Collective has organised conferences, events, forums, protest and direct action. For more information see: crossbordersydney.org 

The seminar is being held as part of the Crisis Complex exhibition at the Tin Sheds Gallery, with the support of Transforming Cultures, UTS (http://www.tfc.uts.edu.au/). Doors will open at 1:30 for a 2pm start. 

“PROTECTION RACKETS”: gender, mobile subjects, and the state

Come down to the Rat at 7pm this Thursday 16th August for the second in the cross-border collective’s monthly series of seminars on the theme of Politics, Colonialism, Borders. This event will be a conversation with Elena  Jeffreys, Kiran Grewal and Tanya Seriser on the theme of gender in state practices of ‘protection’. Drawing on their experience in various international contexts, the three speakers will discuss how state practices and discourses of protection often require women to perform ‘victimhood’ in order to access the rights and protections and the state. They will also consider how this may limit women’s autonomy and may even expose them to violence.

Kiran Grewal is an academic in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her research interests are sexual violence, torture, international law and legal institutions and postcolonial feminist theory.

Elena  Jeffreys  is a Sydney-based 37-year-old sex working woman of Anglo-Italian background and is speaking on behalf of Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association. Elena Jeffreys will be presenting on the recent amendments to the Commonwealth Criminal Code s.270 & s.271 (Trafficking) including the introduction of the new category of “forced and servile marriage” and changes to who can be charged for slavery & trafficking in Australia.

Tanya Seriser is a Sydney-based activist and researcher, current teaching in the Facultyof Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney.Tanya writes: ”In this session, I want to raise some questions about western feminists tendency to become fascinated with the ‘spectacle of distant suffering’ which is how Wendy Hesford described the fascination of American feminists with sexual violence in the former Yugoslavia and the desire to ’save brown women from brown men’ seen in both American and European feminist discourses around the middle east and Islam. I want to talk about how this works to position non-western women as victim/objects and how it implicates feminism with Western neo-colonial practices but I’d also be interested in generating some discussion on  what conditions are necessary for effective transnational solidarity around gendered violence and women’s oppression.”

Borderzones: a conversation with Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson

• Thursday 5 July 2012 at 18.30pm at the Red Rattler Theatre 6 Faversham St Marrickville.
  
  Come down to the Rat for the first in a monthly series of seminars on the theme of Politics, Colonialism Borders. The first event will be a conversation between Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra on the theme of borderzones.
  
  Politics, Colonialism, Borders is a series of monthly seminars that aim to bring together activists and academics to examine local and international movements and debates in order to develop a counter-politics of the border beyond the eradication of mandatory detention. In our view, any such political movement must confront and resist Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples. If you would like to get involved in future seminars, please email Katie Hepworth (ketiairport at gmail.com) or Richard Bailey (rb2k at email.com)
  
  Entry is by gold coin donations. Doors will open at 18:30 for a 19:00 start. For those attending the Life in Limbo opening beforehand, there are direct buses from Railway Square to Marrickville, or you can take the train to Sydenham Station 
  
  Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is adjunct fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Western Sydney. In the last decade his work has particularly centred on the relations between globalization, migration and citizenship as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is an active participant in the ‘post-workerist’ debate and one of the founders of the UniNomade network. With Brett Neilson he is currently completing a book entitled Border as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor for Duke University Press.
  
  Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney. He is the coordinator of the transnational research project Transit Labour: Regions, Borders, Circuits. 
  
  Describing their approach, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson write: 
  
  Our approach to borders seeks to trace and track the relevance of their current proliferation from the point of view of the articulation of global processes. This means we do not see borders as devices that obstruct or block global flows. Rather we see them as parameters that enable the channelling of flows and provide coordinates within which flows can be joined or segmented, connected or disconnected. The processes of the proliferation of borders and the multiplication of labour that we analyse in our work are crucial to the disarticulation of the dyad citizen-worker and to the production of new, flexible and mobile assemblages of labour markets and citizenship. Contrary to the dominant tendency in border studies, even more pronounced after September 11, to stress dynamics of exclusion, we focus on the changing shape of inclusion that can be analysed assuming the perspective of the border. In our attempt to move beyond the binary inclusion/exclusion, pointing to the proliferation of subject positions that are neither fully included nor fully excluded from the space of citizenship and from labour markets, of subjectivities that are neither fully insiders nor fully outsiders.
  
  

Call for Participants: Politics, Colonialism, Borders Seminar Series

Cross-border collective is inviting activists, artists, academics, and others to participate in a series of monthly seminars and debates around the following questions:

 What does it mean to construct no borders politics in an occupied/colonised land? 

What borders were/are erased, forgotten, imagined, or inscribed by colonialism? 

Does a rights-based politics centred around borders of nation and state deny, exclude or promote other sites of oppression and their borders/borderings? 

How can we create genuine solidarity that avoids tokenism or representation in this context? 

Do our conceptions of political movement and resistant subjectivity need to be rethought?

Our aim is to bring together activists and academics to examine local and international movements and debates in order to develop a counter-politics of the border beyond the eradication of mandatory detention. In our view, any such political movement must confront and resist Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples. To be effective, such a movement must continue to recalibrate political thinking and action. In order to encourage a diverse range of people to come together and debate these questions, the series will be held at the Red Rattler.

We are currently looking for people who would like to participate in the series. This participation will be in the form of roundtable discussions around themes inspired by the above questions. Participants will be invited to present a 5-10 min presentation in response to the month’s theme, followed by discussion with other panellists and the audience. 

It is usual for this type of event to assemble a group of speakers to present their own work around a broad theme. Such events, though interesting, often produce only peripheral and fleeting dialogues and connections. We would like to invite speakers to address the questions we have posed above. This will obviously involve bringing your own work or interests and perhaps even critiquing the questions we have asked or failed to ask. We hope this might create a fuller dialogue and perhaps ongoing conversion. 

Some possible seminar themes include:

·         indigenous sovereignty, white sovereignty and the response of the left

·         rights and humanitarian interventions

·         gender, sexuality and bordering

·         political movement/s

·         non-citizens and the performance of sovereignty

·         borders and bordering practices

If you would like to participate in one of these panels, or have ideas for additional panels, please email Katie Hepworth (ketiairport at gmail dot com) or Richard Bailey (rb2k at email dot com). Please provide a brief description of your interests, how you would like to be involved, and an idea of your availability.  For people outside of Sydney: at this stage we can’t offer funds to travel from interstate, however we can provide you with a place to stay while you are here.  Please forward this message on to comrades, friends, or colleagues who might be interested. Apologies for cross-postings.

We don’t cross borders; borders cross us poster launch

                               Sat 26th of May, 7 -10.30pm at the Red Rattler                                       

Entry is $15 with a poster pack, or $5 without – no one will be turned away because of lack of funds.

There is some crackin talks and performances lined up for the night including:

Ray Jackson, Indigenous Elder and president of the Indigenous Social Justice Association is going to be  issuing Aboriginal Passports to refugees in a ceremony live on stage

See the migrant sex worker poster - in all its body building glory - come to life! Plus a talk by Jules Kim from the Scarlet Alliance Australian Sex Worker Assocation Migration project! 

Inisghts on incarceration and creativity from Majid who built a microphone, art implements, an electric hookah pipe, a radio, listening device and more using found materials while locked up!  

Not to mention getting your hands on the beautiful and compelling artworks that make up this poster series….

Stick around after the formalities to listen to some tunes from our resident DJ, put some money over the bar to the wonderful people down at the Red Rattler and bail up some of the contributing artists.

                                       Come on down (and bring yer mum)!