Prof. Radha Hegde visited Utrecht University on June 24 to lead a masterclass on “Mediating Migration” and give a lecture on “Itinerant Data: Unveiling Gendered Scrutiny at the Border”.
Masterclass on “Mediating Migration”
Grasping the connections between media and migration today requires going beyond causal paradigms and reductive disciplinary boundaries. Recent works in media theory and the evolving cultural and material pressures of migration call for more integrative analyses that approach these topics through constitutive logics of assemblage and infrastructure. The concept of mediation is an important and evolving analytic to this end, speaking to entangled, transnational, and multi-directional influences across mobility, technologies, identity and sense-making today.
This masterclass discussed current theoretical engagements with mediation in dialogue with contemporary formations in citizenship, borders and mass movements. It argued that mediation is central to both the material and representational aspects of virtually all components of migration, circulating and reconstituting the grounds upon which mobility and migration are understood and enacted.
PCI/Doing Gender Lecture on “Itinerant Data: Unveiling Gendered Scrutiny at the Border”
Technologized border regimes transform bodies with great speed into data and embed them within archives of suspicion. Examining the performance of surveillance rituals directed towards Muslim women at airports, this presentation discusses how classifications at digital frontiers reproduce familiar patterns of discrimination. The objections raised by Muslim women about the circulation of their cellular data serve as a point of departure to rethink national beloninging in terms of the new itinerancy of data, corporeal transparancy and the digital archive as expression and identification.
Sandra Ponzanesi was chair at this event. The lecture was jointly organized by the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) and the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG). More information about the event can be found here.
Speaker
Radha S. Hegde is Professor at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Mediating Migration (2016), editor of Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures (2011), and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (2017). Currently she serves as the Dahlem International Network Professor for Gender Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.