Borders: An interdisciplinary roundtable

The border – the place physically crossed in the search for refuge and asylum – appears at first as a single location and moment.  And yet ‘borders’ are made and remade through policies, institutions, international and national laws, and conceptions of rights. These, in turn, are founded on specific understandings of ethics and of the human, on historical contingencies, settlements and accidents. Borders can be openings, or they can act as hard limits. 

To understand forced migration and borders in all their experiential, epistemological, methodological and disciplinary complexity, we need thinking that crosses the borders of our own academic disciplines.  

This roundtable brings together thinkers from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to facilitate interdisciplinary exploration of the complexities of borders. 

This is a hybrid event, taking place in-person at UNSW Sydney and live-streamed. Please note the in-person event is sold out. Remote attendance is still available. 

Speakers: 

• Ruth Balint
• Andrew Burridge
• Maria Giannacopoulos
• Brett Neilson
• Saba Vasefi
• Umut Ozguc
• Chair: Daniel Ghezelbash

This roundtable is taking place as part of the 2022 Kaldor Centre Conference, ‘Turning points: New directions in refugee protection’ Organised in partnership with the Forced Migration Research Network and the UNSW Anti-Racism Collective. To explore the full conference program and register for other sessions, visit www.kaldorconference.com. 

About the speakers

Dr Ruth Balint is an Associate Professor in History and Deputy Head of the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW. She is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, and writes and teaches about histories of migration, displacement, film and the family. Although situated within the discipline of history, she draws on international law, refugee studies, political science, ethnography and cultural studies to inform her research. She has published widely on refugee encounters with power in mid-twentieth century Europe, and the way these encounters contributed to the creation of a socio-legal refugee identity and shaped new technologies of immigration that remain, anachronistically, cemented in law and policy today. This is the subject of her book, Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and their Quest to Leave Europe after 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2021). She is also the co-author of Smuggled: An Illegal History of Journeys to Australia (NewSouth, 2021). She is currently working on two Australian Research Council Discovery projects, examining a history of family separation during the Second World War and Russian migration during Australia’s Cold War.

Dr Andrew Burridge is a political geographer, based in the Discipline of Geography and Planning, in the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. His work has focused primarily upon undocumented migration, the effects of border securitisation and immigration detention, as well as asylum and refugee reception and settlement. Andrew is the co-founder of the Australian Critical Border Studies Network (ACBS). 

Dr Maria Giannacopoulos is Associate Professor in Criminology in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney. An interdisciplinary scholar and a second-generation migrant from Greece, Maria draws upon her lived history and experiences of assimilation and integration in her scholarship. Across her work Maria has sustained a critical focus upon the operations of settler law to reveal its role in maintaining colonial relations of power that impacts most acutely upon Indigenous peoples, refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. In 2020 she received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for the development of a decolonial methodology for teaching criminology. Her book Colonial Debtscapes: Austerity Sovereignty Law is under contract with Palgrave. 

Dr Brett Neilson is Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. With Sandro Mezzadra, he is author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019). With Ned Rossiter, Anna Munster, Liam Magee and others, he is working on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled The Geopolitics of Automation. His current writing project is The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World. 

Dr Saba Vasefi is a multi-award-winning scholar-journalist, documentary filmmaker and poet. She teaches at the University of Sydney, Macquarie University and University of Canberra. Her report on the gendered harms of detention won the Premier's Multicultural Communications Awards. She is the chief editor of Borderless, A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry and editor of Writing in Resistance for Red Room Poetry. She was twice a judge for the Dolatabadi Book Prize for the Best Book on Women's Literature and Women's Issues and the BR4R Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize. She is a member of The UK Women in Refugee Law (WiRL) network and an honorary member of The Independent Scholars Association of Australia. 

Umut Ozguc is a lecturer at International Relations. She is an international relations scholar with a research interest in critical border and security studies. She joined Deakin University in 2020 after working as a postdoctoral research fellow in International Ethics at the UNSW Canberra. Her research focuses on the construction of borders in settler colonial states, border walls, posthuman borders, and the changing nature of security in the context of global mobility regime. She is the co-founder of Australian Critical Border Studies Network. 

Dr Daniel Ghezelbash is an Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney. His research interests include international and comparative refugee and migration law, judicial analytics and access to justice. His research transcends traditional disciplinary barriers, drawing on everything from law, computing, political science, behavioural psychology and data science. He is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, leading a project examining fast-track asylum policies, and whether it is possible to design procedures which are both fair and efficient. He has also published widely on the way restrictive asylum policies have spread around the world. This is the topic of his book, Refuge Lost: Asylum Law in an Interdependent World (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 

Image credit: UNHCR/Adrienne Suprenant