Category: Opinions / Good Practice

In the process of preparing the Conference “Humanity / Humanities on the Move” Opinions (in essays etc.) & examples of Good Practice show us the possibilities of Humanities dealing with refugees and migration processes.

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(De)Othering website launch

The site deothering.ces.uc.pt is one of the outputs of the research project “(De)Othering: Desconstructing risk and otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter narratives on migrants/refugees and “Internal others” in the Portuguese and European mediascapes” (2018-2021).

The project’s focus – an analysis of Portugal in the light of other European cases affected by migrant/refugee flows (Italy and Germany) and by terrorist threats (United Kingdom and France) – aims to explore the construction of transnational narratives of risk pervading Europe regardless of the ‘differential’ exposure to them.

(De)Othering is coordinated by Gaia Giuliani and Sílvia Roque and hosted by Centre for Social Studies. It is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Available in Portuguese and in English, it is a tool to keep up with the project’s progress and bring together researchers, activists and artists interested in these topics.

We invite you to access deothering.ces.uc.pt and welcome suggestions and comments.

No border greetings,

(De)Othering team

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In the 21st century, we are all migrants

Humans are in motion across time as well as geography. Why must we be divided, the migrant versus the native?
by Mohsin Hamid

ALL OF US are descended from migrants. Our species, Homo sapiens, did not evolve in Lahore, where I am writing these words. Nor did we evolve in Shanghai or Topeka or Buenos Aires or Cairo or Oslo, where you, perhaps, are reading them.

(…)
Ours is a migratory species. Humans have always moved. Our ancestors did, and not linearly, like an army advancing out of Africa in a series of bold thrusts, but circuitously, sometimes in one direction, then in another, borne along by currents both without and within. Our contemporaries are moving—above all from the countryside to the cities of Asia and Africa. And our descendants will move too. They will move as the climate changes, as sea levels rise, as wars are fought, as one mode of economic activity dies out and gives way to another.

Read the whole essay in National Geographic magazine