Inaugural CICI Symposium | Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), which houses The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, is delighted to announce our inaugural symposium: Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration. The event will take place March 10-11, 2023, at the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley.

Borders are marked by fences and walls, but also by technologies, laws, imperial histories of sovereignty and nation states. Borders divide and partition spaces, as visible barriers and as invisible techniques of classification and control, yet their thresholds are also routinely breached, renegotiated, or reimagined by unruly subjects, by movements both orchestrated and unpredictable. How do contemporary border policies and technologies reanimate histories of racialized and imperial violence? How are climate and environmental change affecting borders and their crossing? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian and human rights discourses on migration and refugees? What forms of dissent, becoming and belonging are taking shape at borders?

Our speakers address these questions from a range of fields—anthropology to literature, architecture to law—and identify new approaches to transdisciplinary border studies.

Thomas Keenan (Human Rights, Comparative Literature) | Bard College
Paradoxes of Recognition: How to Make a Refugee

Zahid Chaudhary (English) | Princeton
The Border as Illness

Deniz Göktürk (German) | UC Berkeley
Tracing Complicity through Personal Archives and AI: On the Role of Art in Border Trouble

Borders Keyword Roundtable
Moderated by Judith Butler (Philosophy) with Carolyn Chen (Sociology, Religion), Khatharya Um (Ethnic Studies), Yogita Goyal (African American Studies), Rhiannon Welch (Italian), and Camilla Hawthorne (Geography)

Cristiana Giordano (Anthropology) | UC Davis
What’s in a List?: Storying the Dead through Affect Theater

Leti Volpp (Law) | UC Berkeley
Abolition in the U.S. Immigration Law Context

Miriam Ticktin (Anthropology) | CUNY
Borders and Commoning: The Struggle over Political Imagination

Ronald Rael (Art Practice, Architecture)
Notes from the Borderland

CICI fosters cross-divisional collaborations on the Berkeley campus and beyond to address the most urgent political, social, religious and environmental issues of our times. Our programs include the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Critical Theory, the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative, and Digital Humanities. We are committed to thinking across an array of fields, including the human, social, and natural sciences, to develop a capacious vision of critical thought, creative practice, justice and ethics.

For any questions or more information, please contact: info.cici@berkeley.edu.

Presented by the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and cosponsored by the Arts Research Center and the Center for Race & Gender.