Keynote Speakers

Josefina Domínguez Mujica

Crisis and migration: a dialectical relationship in peripheral island spaces.

A case study of El Hierro (Canary Islands)

Crisis and migration are words that have a strong echo in scientific literature as well as closely related concepts in the field of Social Sciences, acquiring their full meaning in the framework of the outermost islands of the European Union. The dialectic relationship between crisis and migration is reinforced when analysed from the peripheral island spaces, relational spaces, cores of interdependence, bounded but porous.

In the EU outermost Atlantic islands, crises and migration processes are paradigmatically articulated as lived experiences. The crises have created threats and opportunities, while favouring a broad transformation of socio-economic structures. With respect to human mobility, this factor is the most important link to continental countries, even beyond the European Union and other important political and economic assets.

The intrinsic relationship of migration with islandness and crises is fully revealed on El Hierro, a Canary Island of just 268.71 square kilometres and of slightly more than 11,000 inhabitants, a left-behind area in the outermost of the European Union. The sequence of critical episodes associated to migratory processes of different aetiology highlights its nodal nature and its future cannot be interpreted without the necessary attention to human mobility, a mobility that acquires a new dimension in the context of the 21st century.

Josefina Domínguez Mujica is PhD Professor of Human Geography at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and since 2012 Chairperson of the Commission of the International Geographical Union on Global Change and Human Mobility (Globility). She has devoted most of research to the study of human mobility from the perspectives of the irregular migrations, lifestyle migrations, female migrations, labour migrations, and the circumstances influencing them. She also has dabbled in the Urban, Tourism and Cultural Geography in connection with migrations and ethnicization.

As a result, she has published more than 40 papers in indexed journals in WOS and SCOPUS / Emerging Citation Index and more than fifty book chapters in international and national books of prestigious publishers. Her work has received 1.442 citations in Google Scholar (19 h index). She also has participated in more than one hundred congresses and workshops worldwide and in more than fifteen research projects and agreements. Currently she is the main researcher in the research project funded by the Canary Islands Government (Smart Specialization Strategy of the Canary Islands RIS-3) and ERDF-Operational Program (The post-COVID-19 territorial balance in the Canary Islands. New strategies for new times) and the main researcher of the ULPGC team in the European Project funded by REA (Reframing Non-Metropolitan Left Behind Places through Mobility and Alternative Development). She was member of the Experts’ Group on The Demographic Challenge and the Territorial Balance in the Canary Islands appointed by the Canarian Parliament (2022-2023), co-coordinator of the Expert Group on Immigration appointed by the Canarian Parliament (2008-2011), and Member of the Expert Committee on Población e Inmigración en Canarias appointed by the Presidency of the Canarian Government (2001-2002).

Víctor Barros

Peripheries in Times of Political Violence: The Islands as Spaces of Confinement and Prison During the Estado Novo Regime

This paper explores the connection between peripherical island spaces and political violence. Specifically, it examines how the Portuguese Estado Novo regime used islands as sites of forced exile and imprisonment to marginalize and silence political opponents by removing them from the hegemonic public sphere. By analyzing the deportation of dissidents to islands far from the metropolis and to other imperial territories, as well as the confinement of convicts in the penal colonies established on the islands, the paper highlights how these peripherical spaces were integrated into the system of political repression and colonial violence produced by the Portuguese dictatorship regime.

Víctor Barros is PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Coimbra, completed with the support of a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation research fellowship. His doctoral thesis on historical commemorations and the construction of memory of the Portuguese empire in African colonies was awarded with an honourable mention in the Third Edition of the Agostinho Neto International Historical Research Prize in 2020. From 2016 to 2019, Barros worked as a researcher in the project ‘Amílcar Cabral – From Political History to Politics of Memory’, hosted at Nova University of Lisbon, and having carried out archival research and organizing seminars in Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, Portugal and France. He is author of the book on colonial concentration camps in Cabo Verde, as well as of several articles on topics such as commemorations, Portuguese colonialism, transnational anticolonial solidarity, politics of memory, colonial monuments and history writing. His works has been published in journals such as The International History Review, Revista Portuguesa de História, European Contemporary History, etc. A former member of the École des Hautes Études Hispaniques et Ibériques from Casa de Velázquez, in Madrid (during 2022-2023), he is currently aresearcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal).

Paulo de Medeiros

(unfortunately will not be able to attend for reasons of force majeur)

World-Literature, Crisis, Resistance

Comparative Literature, the overarching discipline under which the field known as World Literature falls, was from crisis, exile, and resistance, and still remains defined by them. World Literature, although it has necessarily expanded the range of texts to be considered well beyond the central, largely European, literatures, paradoxically has also tended to enhance the canonical function of some texts. This, I suggest, neutralises the founding notion of crisis, risks sanitising and dismissing all the history of suffering and struggle inherent in many of the same texts, and leads to the erasure of the very notion of periphery used to legitimise the field. I propose to view World-Literature (as in Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory) drawing on the work of the Warwick Research Collective to emphasise World-Literature’s potential for resistance. Some texts that will be mentioned include Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, Damon Glagut’s The Promise, and Adania Shibli’s, Minor Detail.

Paulo de Medeiros is Professor of Modern and Contemporary World Literature and Head of the English and Comparative Literary Studies programme at the University of Warwick. He was Associate Professor at Bryant College (USA) and Professor at Utrecht University (Netherlands) before moving to Warwick. In 2011–2012 he was Keeley Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford, and in 2013–2014 President of the American Portuguese Studies Association. Hiis recent publications include a co-edited volume on Contemporary Lusophone Film: Transnational Communities and Alternative Communities (Routledge, 2021) and another on Postcolonial Theory & Crisis (De Gruyter, 2024)