Circular Movements: Migratory Citizenships in Anticolonial Athens

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• Dr Tom Western (University College London)
• Tuesday 15 March 2022, 18:00-19:15
• Gatsby Room, Chancellor's Centre, Wolfson College.

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This seminar remaps geographies of citizenship in Athens. It thinks the city in circles and circulations, tracing how people creatively contest the racialised logics of borders and citizenship regimes, reimagining questions of being and belonging in the city. The paper is structured in three movements. The talk focuses, first, on how movements move – how activisms travel, circulate, migrate; how citizenship struggles shuttle from place to place; how resistances resonate across relational geographies. Multiple social movements from Eastern Mediterranean cities gather and converge in Athens today, generating a feedback loop around the sea. The second movement thinks with poets – from Greece and from the Caribbean – who write about Athens in circular movements, as the city echoes across anticolonial trajectories. The third movement foregrounds dance and the ways that youth activists combine Greek and Arabic dances into anti-border choreographies. These dances share the shape of the open circle, which becomes a space of belonging – a choreography of citizenship. Through these movements, the city becomes a testing ground of activisms, a song of solidarities, an amplifier of demands, an anticolonial Athens. And the seminar seeks to reimagine citizenship through movement, as movement, as a movement.

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This talk is part of the Wolfson College Humanities Society series.

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• Gatsby Room, Chancellor's Centre, Wolfson College
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