On Displacement and the Humanities—An Introduction

1. Introduction

When we conceived of the volume, Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present, six years ago, important and urgent studies on the subject of migration had increased substantially over the past decade in response to what has been termed the ‘migration crisis’. The issue is seemingly timeless, and yet, the long term historical perspective shows just how ambivalent the category of migration is. What does it mean for human mobility to become a problem—a crisis? Usually, the subject is addressed from either the perspective of the host or the home community, focusing on the impact of arrival or departure. Between these two points are those who are displaced, often for periods that last more than a generation.1 For this reason, we chose to focus on the critical issue of displacement. We broadly construed this as both the involuntary movement of people from a place of belonging, whether due to forms of conflict, famine, persecution, or environmental disasters, and also, conversely, the suspension of movement that leaves people existing without place.

The more focused heuristic lens of displacement allows us to consider cross-historical perspectives which do not immediately risk conflating ‘migration’ with ‘refuge’ or ‘asylum’. It also provides a platform for discourse on place, space and territory—as shifting entities in relation to human belonging, statehood, mobility and control. It confronts the visibility and potency of displaced agency. It is not about comparison or lessons learned from history, nor was our aim to portray some kind of teleological historical trajectory either into dissolution or civilisation. Rather, the lens of displacement is about situating historical and modern concerns across the longue durée, to enhance our understanding and encourage new questions to expand the possibility of alternative imaginaries of then, now and into the future. This, we believe, is what the Humanities are capable of in exposing the way narratives are constructed and providing possibilities for new narratives, which have the potential to impact how people are perceived—now and in the past—as insiders or outsiders, as welcomed or rejected. Among the many possible definitions of Humanities, the one that encompasses particularly well what this volume tries to achieve is that outlined by Drees, in his work What Are the Humanities For? (Drees 2021, pp. 7, 10):

Humanities are academic disciplines in which humans seek understanding of human self-understandings and self-expressions, and of the ways in which people thereby construct and experience the world they live in. Thus, the tentative definition [is]… Most humans are “other humans”, near and far. To understand these, we need to be able to communicate—and, hence, we need language. And we need to understand their context, their place, the space they move in. As we seek to understand them, we need to reflect upon the process of understanding and the criteria involved. Our scholarly understanding of others need not be received well, as historical insight may be at odds with the self-understanding of people involved.

… In the humanities we study human languages, historical episodes, cultures, artistic expressions, ritual practices, religious beliefs, and much more. We study histories and languages of people far and near, and thereby we come to understand better our own language and history as well. By studying their art and their beliefs, we may come to reconsider our own beliefs and expressions as well. By developing our knowledge of humans, by engaging in the humanities, we learn to navigate this complex world with other humans. We are humans studying humans.

The volume brings together contributors who seek to provoke a discourse across the field of Humanities, including the disciplines of Classics and Ancient History. The intention was to create a dynamic collection using a dialogical platform that values diverse forms of knowledge, whether gathered through practice, through lived experience, training or other forms of expertise, ensuring a robust scholarly discourse understood in the most inclusive sense. Our starting point was an invitation to practitioners to offer perspectives and positions on displacement as a way to catalyse the discourse, which was then picked up in more extensive historical studies by contributors who have specialist knowledge within diverse periods and contexts, but with a primary focus on the ancient world. The discussion was taken further by researchers from different disciplines acting as respondents to each historical study, bringing in their additional expertise and reflections to deepen our understanding and suggest new questions. We hoped to gather contributors who, at a theoretical and methodological level, could: remap the priorities for current research agendas; open up disciplines and critically analyse their approaches; address the socio-political responsibilities that we have as scholars and practitioners; provide an alternative site of discourse for contemporary concerns; and lastly, stimulate future interdisciplinary work and collaborations beyond the academy.

Whether we have succeeded in our aims will depend on the continuity of the dialogue, but most of all, we hope for this to be the beginning of new conversations, challenges and collaborations. This introduction is by no means a summary of the work on the subject. Rather, it is a discourse that we envisaged would proceed along three exploratory paths: Volatile Concepts, Tangible Creations and Critical Approaches. These eventually intertwined and diverged as contributors responded to each other’s provocations.

2. Between Conceptual and Material Ways of Being

The discussions in this volume were first fuelled by the contributions of diverse practitioners, whom we refer to as Catalysts. It is striking how many of their explorations break down material worlds. They expand notions of place while challenging the impossibility of place-making in contexts of displacement and also what it means to lead meaningful lives beyond existence in the meantime, or within ‘permanent temporariness’ (Hilal and Petti 2018). In this vein, Ayham Dalal’s photo essay, Uncovering Culture and Identity in Refugee Camps, forces a recognition that even as people living in refugee camps are pressed into grids of ‘sameness’, they defy the homogeneity of their white box dwellings. Instead, through subtle material and performative acts, these practices become windows into the multiplicity of worlds they contain. The Catalyst pieces therefore expose how the very act of inhabiting is situated as a transgression. It is visible in the improvised concrete slab architecture of Sao Paolans in Brazil (Ligian Nobre, Anderson Kazuo Nakano)2 or the Dandara Community in Brazil’s Belo Horizonte (Beatriz Ribeiro, Fernando Oelze, Orlando Soares Lopes). We see it explicitly in Alessandro Petti’s proposition of recognizing a multi-generational refugee camp as a valid form of human heritage—one worthy of inscription as a World Heritage site—and thus challenging its exceptionalism. The spaces of displacement are deconstructed and shown as places of intersection where individual story-lines converge, revealing a continuum with cityscapes. There is a further questioning of where displaced histories live, especially where displacement has stretched over generations into a state of permanent temporariness—where time itself becomes incomprehensible—as in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s poem, Time. Through multiple examples, the Catalysts not only provide a different lens, but also reverse the gaze through which to understand the historical and present contexts. They expose the fragile foundations of power structures, and they force a recognition that the precarity and marginalisation assigned to the displaced is also shared by those in society who are emplaced and possess seemingly effective citizenships.

While there is no denial that a tremendous difference lies in the promise of access to rights and protection that those with effective citizenship hold, there are other human rights which extend beyond the reach of nation-state protocols. These may include seemingly simple yet essential rights that humanise even within the condition of temporariness: such as the right to prepare a bride for her wedding, the right to host or the right to conduct research and have one’s knowledge and scholarship valued with possibilities for exchange and co-creation. Another way to express this may be a right to rhythm and place. Such rights and the potential of the Humanities is what challenged us to create a dialogical publication that could incorporate multiple forms of knowledge-making and perspectives. We situate this discourse within research projects that focus on such co-authorship as in the volume, The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers, edited by Marcia C. Schenck and Kate Reed (See Schenck and Reed 2023). Thus, in the spirit of a dialogical approach and as a way to continue exchanges into the future, the introduction is written in conversation with two contributors of The Right to Research: the historians Marcia C. Schenck, based in Potsdam, Germany, and Gerawork Teferra Gizaw, based in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. Their generous and critical reflections on the themes and aims of this volume are dialogically woven through these pages, in their raw form, thus providing another rhythm to the discourse, which is taken from our discussion of 29 November 2022.

Dialogue I: On Dialogical Research

Gerawork T. Gizaw: What are the steps and how are we going to interact? [00:10:00]3

Evan Jewell: I think we envisaged it as having a large portion of this transcript in the Introduction … if you were okay with that …our hope was that, whatever emerged from this, it would be continuing the dialogic structure of the volume. [00:06:00]

Elena Isayev: I think we just need to see what might work better, but keeping it very much dialogical so that it becomes a semi-creative piece of work. [00:09:00]

Marcia C. Schenck: The whole process of research in the first place is a dialogue, right? So that’s just making it very explicit by saying, here’s the transcription of the dialogue. [00:08:00]

Elena Isayev: … so Marcia…

Marcia C. Schenck: I am going to speak more about the scholarly production side of this, because that’s the environment from which I can comment. And here I actually really like that you talk about a manifesto because to me that’s really important to frame it in that way of having a written statement in which you talk about your intentions of what more inclusive scholarship can look like. I was reminded very much of, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s reflections on silences (Trouillot 2015, p. 25). When we talk about refugee history, we often say it’s so hard in the archives to really get at the historical agency of those who were displaced. But then there’s many ways around that, and I think you have found a great way, by engaging voices from very different contexts, and also by bringing practitioners into the conversation.

The four ways in which historical actors that are at the margins, like refugees or displaced people, get silenced according to Trouillot, are in the making of the source itself, in the assembling then of the archives and in the conception of historical narratives, as well as in the creation of what he calls “history in the final instance”. This whole special collection goes to address these different stages. You’re creating an archive, right? You have, for instance, the beautiful poem Time, which can be read as a primary source in itself. The Catalysts all contribute to creating an archive. And they are sources by themselves or [00:38:00] in and of themselves. And then you are creating historical narratives where you have the papers authored by historians that reflect on different archives, bringing in the Catalysts as well as primary sources. And then you are writing also a version of history in the final instance with of course the histories and the responses. Pluralizing that, because you have respondents getting back at the papers that are being produced, commenting on them from very different angles. And that again opens up the field of what the final production of history might look like. We can see the different forms of these dialogues when we take, just as an example, Lena, your piece and then the responses to it by Paul Magee and Paul Collis—the recorded conversational response about meanings of non-arrival and arrival in the Aboriginal context.4 We can also see how diverse history can be, and this is to me a really strong point of the Special Issue, that it addresses all these forms of silencing those at the margins. [00:39:00] And again, by saying “those at the margins”, I’m of course talking from a very specific state-focused lens that defines who’s at the margins of what.

Elena Isayev: Thank you…and also for bringing in the way other frameworks might help showcase [how] things could be taken forward beyond this kind of volume… and we might get [to] that towards the end.

Evan Jewell: That really made me rethink, especially the Catalyst section, [00:40:00] just thinking of it as an archive. It’s something that hadn’t hit home as much as it should have, so thanks for that.

3. Key Themes and Interventions

In approaching this volume and its agenda—or manifesto(s)—we were cognizant of the spectre of previous work on the topic of displacement and the influence of the nation-state and its increasingly technocratic approach to displaced persons and groups. As such, we aimed to move away from frameworks of displacement that placed state-based notions of power and authority at their core, and we sought to discern alternatives. A number of the Catalyst pieces were commissioned because they highlight displacements resulting also from pressures of non-state actors, such as real estate developers in Brazil (Ribeiro, Oelze, Soares Lopes) and Palestine (Athar Mufreh), or because they offer an opportunity to consider alternatives to the nation-state itself. Petti (in this volume, p. 5) asserts that “Palestinian refugee camps are the only space through which we can start to imagine and practice a political community beyond the idea of the nation-state.” In this sense, the ancient context also provides alternative imaginaries, since it presents a world beyond and before the nation-state, a world before the technocratic tools used to measure and control movement across geo-political borders. Increasingly, we find numbers standing in for people in the media as well as in scholarship (see, e.g., Jewell, in this volume, for a critique), a trend that risks promoting monolithic narratives and the flattening of heterogeneous experiences of displacement. Hence, our aim here was to re-centre the people and their experience in contexts of displacement. This also means that only a few of the contributors consider the root causes and the triggers for peoples’ decision to leave their homes and seek refuge: most explicitly in relation to war and violence (Jason Moralee and Eliza Gettel) and in relation to climatic factors (Elisa Perego and Rafael Scopacasa). For many of the contributors, displacement becomes defined by the experience referred to as in-between, or non-arrival and, at times, de-placement. The discourse that developed between Catalysts, Historians and Respondents addresses a number of key themes which are outlined in the remainder of the introduction.

Dialogue II: Displacement as Mobility

Evan Jewell: The first question we wanted to start off with was: did you find if there’s anything that surprised or excited you about the volume or its contributions? Just anything that caught you off guard or stood out to you, good or bad, that made you think differently. [00:12:00]

Gerawork T. Gizaw: Actually, there are many things that really strike me. The first one, which I raise as a good point, is the question that you brought in the beginning related to mobility. I think it’s good if I read it now, it says, “what does it mean for a human mobility to become a problem or a crisis?” For me, that’s a very big question and I expected some answers in the details there. Unfortunately, the volume goes in a different direction. I don’t know whether it is deliberate or I misunderstood the concept. [00:13:00] [The volume] tries to separate displacement away from mobility. It defines displacement as an involuntary movement, and it indirectly defines mobility as a voluntary movement. For me, there is a very big—I don’t know what to call it—gap, which differentiates my experience from the experience of that mentioned there [in the volume]. When I think of displacement or, as you said, involuntary movement, I see my experience and others’ experience within our context, and most of our mobility could be called displacement because most of it is involuntary. [00:14:00] I understand that as mobility, as a natural way of coping and living. It might be caused by routine conflicts, natural disasters or —whatever we’ve faced in that system.

So, to me, the real definition of mobility includes displacement …, but the volume entirely removes displacement from mobility. So I started thinking, okay, if involuntary movement is displacement, I ask myself, what is the other voluntary movement? I think those voluntary movements like tourism, education, which are considered formal ways of movement now came to exist after nation-states emerged. So it was very difficult for me to go back and find some past [00:15:00] stories related to displacement which are different from mobility. In this sense, I see the gap. Such a gap disfavours people who are like me. Just to give you some specific examples. Here in the host nation, the Turkana community, right now, whenever there is a drought, they cross the Uganda border with their cattle. For me, that’s part of mobility. Cattle raiding is common here, in Sudan and Ethiopia, which causes mobility. We consider it as part of our lifestyle. We don’t even consider it as conflict, or conflict is part of the lifestyle, that’s how I see mobility from our context.

Elena Isayev: Thank you, Gera. Before we answer or respond to that powerful insight, maybe Marcia wants to pick up some of those points.

Marcia C. Schenck: I like the way that you think about displacement as involuntary movement because [00:17:00] coming from a labour history angle, mobility offered a way to not think of migration as very defined, or teleological, but really as happening more on a continuum in which you have more or less mobility and freedom, but really most of it is somewhere in the middle. We don’t really have pure forms of forced or voluntary migration, because many people usually move for a variety of reasons at the same time. But at the same time, in recent years, the literature has embraced mobility in very uncritical ways. Almost positing mobility and freedom as equal, and thereby buying into this neoliberal narrative, which will talk about flexibility or self-innovation and [00:18:00] not think about the constraints that come with a global labour market in which one moves for instance, or what other economic imperatives or experiences of violence there might be that compel people to move. So in that sense, I think this kind of uncritical move towards mobility or a celebration of mobility isn’t very helpful. While displacement might not be a perfect word, it sort of brings this being “in place” or being “out of place” of a person … to the foreground. That to me is very helpful in thinking about bodies and people that move across time and place, and then one can broaden the conversation: what aspects are perhaps voluntary, what aspects are involuntary? What does that even mean? How do systems, how do contexts influence these decisions?

Evan Jewell: Gera, your response really made me think because it’s a really valid critique, I guess in the sense if I understood you correctly, using the term [00:21:00] displacement, are we re-inscribing mobility as a problem, right, as a crisis, because that very term, has all of these implications within it. And, people who are displaced when they are called displaced are often then thought of as a problem. In that sense I think that’s something we—I definitely take your point—we didn’t really tackle that as much in terms of digging down into the word itself and have we really gotten away from that?

Elena Isayev: In terms of what Gera was saying, I wonder, it’s interesting Gera that on the one hand you’re positioning, quite rightly (and I think this is what Evan was referring to) as let’s not think about these things as dichotomies, but rather see them as part of one process. And then as Marcia is saying, how we define voluntary and involuntary could itself be both problematic and may mean different things in different historical contexts as well as in [00:23:00] socio-political contexts. But I’m also wondering to what extent there is an assumption that most people don’t move. So in other words, that mobility occurs only when something comes under stress, except for the very few examples that you gave about positive reasons for mobility, like education or other voluntary reasons for mobility as tourism. And I think that’s something that, at least within the ancient context, we can really begin to challenge. So when we think about causality, in historical terms, if we’re starting out from the perspective of sedentism as the norm and movement only happens if something disrupts that, then you have very different issues around causalities of why certain things happen. And the movements of people are seen as negative—climatic changes, even in the ancient world that drive people to move somewhere else en masse or sieges that force people out. But the other thing we see outside of mass displacements [00:24:00] is a very high level of individual or personal mobility where people set out without necessarily knowing when they will come back, if they will come back, or even their destination. Different things drive them in different parts of their life. I think there is something we didn’t touch on in the Introduction—but pick up in other bits of writing—is the life-cycle. And this also maybe addresses some of what Marcia was saying, which is: if we are to talk about freedom in relation to mobility, it’s about having the freedom to move maybe in earlier years of one’s life and then having the freedom to not move in later periods of one’s life. I don’t know if freedom is the right word there, but I think in that sense of seeing things as part of a continuum, is definitely something we need to reflect on more [00:25:00].

4. Citizenship and Cosmopolitanism

Community membership may be the foundation of the ancient city-state and the current nation-state, but the way it is practiced on the ground and delineated by authorities differs significantly through time. Hence, the meaning of exclusion from it, or living in possession of it, is also not self-evident, which opens up possibilities for its alternative imagining, especially through the lens of cosmopolitanism. Some of the contributors challenge the exceptionality of ancient citizenship and consider how the institution could be appropriated by incomers and exiles within a host citizen community. Our authors explore how citizenship could at once provide a privileged status for a certain group, and yet still displace them for the state’s imperial ambitions. Some of these studies thus bring out the porous, double-sided nature of citizenship. Benjamin Gray argues that ancient Greek citizenship—an early forerunner of modern models of citizenship—could be harnessed and adapted by displaced people in order to form effective and sometimes innovative political communities in exile. Some ancient protagonists experimented with cosmopolitan styles of civic interaction and ideology in improvised quasi-civic communities—or ‘poleis-in-exile’. Subverting the exclusionary nature of the institution of citizenship, displaced groups could appeal to powers beyond individual states, as Eliza Gettel demonstrates in the example of the islanders from Delos displaced by Athens in 167 BCE, and also in the role of imperial Rome. In response to her exploration, Irial Glynn finds resonances and divergences with the plight of the Chagos Islanders in the Indian Ocean during the 20th century, in terms of the legal recourse sought by them at the international courts, and the role of colonial powers, such as the UK and US. Their continued presence on the islands was rendered as a radical act of inhabitation, perhaps akin to the Delians. Athar Mufreh’s chapter exposes experimentation with Global Real Estate and Smart Cities in the West Bank of Palestine, which captures new forms of elite economic citizenship emerging within a broader geography of displacement and disenfranchisement of an entire group of people.

Different concerns emerge in Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s exploration of differentiated forms of citizenship and their constraints on movement, especially those of an immigrant body. Reading alongside forms of its differentiation, which emerged with the growth of the Roman empire, he moves transhistorically from Greece to Rome to Puerto Rico, to consider the insular cases of 19th century US imperialism, wherein “the island colony is doomed never to be a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (Padilla Peralta, in this volume, p. 3). Evan Jewell’s chapter on Roman colonization also examines civic hierarchies in the way that the Roman elite deployed colonization initiatives as a mechanism to displace plebeians and freedmen to the margins of empire. The agency of these colonists becomes questionable, as their marginal status is exposed in their stigmatization through metaphors of waste water. These metaphors resonate with Padilla Peralta’s reflection on Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty, which “marks the migrant as discard, as excrescence, as effluvium” (p. 10):

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

It is no coincidence that most people only quote the first two lines, stopping at “the poor”, exposing how enfranchisement and hierarchies of class—together with gender and race—mediate extensions of hospitality to displaced people arriving on a “teeming shore”.

Dialogue III: Agency and Metaphor

[We asked Gera and Marcia to pick out a few examples of interest to them. Here Gera begins by discussing wandering and permanent temporariness in Elena Isayev’s piece].

Gerawork T. Gizaw: The more wandering becomes political, the more it becomes problematic in such contexts, at least. So it’s true, and it’s in my experience, but we are not wandering for such a purpose. The other one [that interests me] is—how to pronounce it—Diogenes the Cynic who’s advocating for cosmopolitan ideals. This is really interesting and I like it, and I wish it would happen, because when I see how the way that some idea of displacement assumes a nation-state, and the way things are intertwined within and across nation sates, I don’t think the solutions can be found there. [00:52:00] To me, as a displaced person, I feel as if mobility works like a safety valve. Without this safety valve, the state may not sustain itself and work.

Elena Isayev: I liked very much your way of expressing the safety valve, which I hadn’t thought about—mobility as a safety valve. Because that brings a question around what is a safety valve. I think I would question, then, your point at the end which said that, for nation states to survive, they need a safety valve. A lot of people that I’ve talked to in the past think that the nation states are the problem, so we don’t necessarily want them to survive. But is it a safety valve then to something else? … Benjamin Gray’s piece in the volume, [00:56:00] when he talks about citizenship… he goes into that kind of world in much more detail.

[…]

Gerawork T. Gizaw: Another takeaway from Diogenes’ reflection, is the statement that refers to everybody’s subversion of the wandering state as a way of being political. Actually, this is my daily experience. Yes. Whenever we are wandering, we see, we connect things and the moment we express it, it looks like political. Thank you for mentioning it in that way, but it’s not a deliberate attempt and we don’t want it to look like that. [00:51:00] The people who are wandering are not the ones who want it to look political, rather it’s a surrounding that makes it political.

Marcia C. Schenck: For me it was like it’s in your heading Lena [of your chapter], the “defiance of the wandering philosopher”. So to me what jumped out was, Diogenes’ attitude towards where he finds himself—having not very much, being in a land far away from what he would see as his home—but trying to see that as a strength. I like the reading of agency in that situation because you read it as a rejection of the victim label. And as we know from at least a lot of [00:58:00] scholarship about refugees in the 20th century, the label of victim was a very important one to inspire donations and fundraising for UNHCR and other initiatives around refugees. So in that sense, refugees and the victimization narrative have been very intertwined, at least in the second half of the 20th century. And I think it’s very interesting to have an early example of how that narrative actually gets cut. And instead, mobility, and in this case also poverty, is sort of claimed as a choice, and when he [Diogenes] was evicted he says, but I condemn the others to stay there. And I think that is a really, really great line because we always talk about leaving as a choice, but really staying is a [00:59:00] choice too. Everybody makes a choice every day, whether that’s to pick up and move or whether that’s to stay. It’s just that the first we always frame as exceptional and the other as the norm. It’s a very convincing reading of the agency of those who find themselves perhaps involuntarily moving that lets them be the agents of history, the agents of their own life choices.

[…]

Gerawork T. Gizaw: Okay, I forgot about the issue of innovativeness. One of the takeaways considers as if we [displaced people] are innovative. Some writers [like Oka, Jansen and others] who studied Kakuma camp and wrote about our entrepreneurial nature (See Oka 2011; Jansen 2018)—in their discussion, they show how we refugees do everything possible to survive, [01:04:00] including illicit or semi-illicit activities, because the question is about sustaining life or survival and such actions seem justifiable. Yes, that form of innovativeness or that form of entrepreneurial skill is there, but when we go out [of the camp] it may not reward us. So if that type of creativity is considered as innovativeness, I think it may be misleading. There are so many matrices that limit us from what we want to do. We do everything possible to pass through them and get what we want. But should we consider that as if we are innovative? I’m afraid not. I remember when we revised a book with Kate [Reed], one refugee who reached Europe in the Jungle camp, had navigated so many countries, including the UK. He finally came back to the Jungle camp. To cross every nation’s boundaries he encountered, he used creative ideas and did everything possible. Yes, of course, there is [01:05:00] creativity there, but at the end of the day, this is what he said: Now I am a different person. I’m not the one who used to be there at home. That different persona that allowed him to do very illicit things brought a different type of personality. So I’m afraid that we may also encourage this type of thing when we say refugees are innovative.

Elena Isayev: What you just said is incredibly powerful, but also in conversation with all of us, what it makes me realize is how much work (at least I’ll speak for myself), how much work I still have to do to recognize where on the one hand I’m trying to bring things together on a particular plane, but actually in the end inadvertently (that’s not an excuse) still create an exclusionary narrative, [01:06:00] or a narrative that is sometimes naive or hopeful, but not hopeful in a way that helps because maybe it masks a lot of things. So …thinking about innovation. I’m very critical of the term resilience for all the reasons that you’ve just described, but I hadn’t assigned those criticisms to also thinking about concepts like innovation.

Evan Jewell: I just want to echo what you were saying, Lena. The bit about agency and the problematics, it’s a thorny word. We try to infuse it with this positive connotation and so forth. And a lot of our authors use that. [01:09:00] But at the same time, as you say, Gera, it kind of—along with endurance and persistence—these words can be euphemisms, but they also can mask a lot of the actual experience of displaced people. And what you were saying in terms of the transformative—not necessarily in a good way—experience, right? How people are just completely changed irrevocably, even as they are supposedly “innovating”.

5. Hospitality

In reflecting on hospitality, we wanted to pick up on the strands of reciprocity, interconnectivity and the role of intermediaries, especially in relation to diverse systems of governance, whether monarchic, democratic or otherwise. How displaced people make and position the host, and what protracted displacement means for host–guest relations, were key questions to push further the hospitality discourse beyond a focus on, for example, the Homeric Epics and Derrida’s reflections on unconditional hospitality (Derrida 2000). Focusing on interconnectivities between hosts and guests, Diego Segatto showcases in his Catalyst piece the convergence of mobilities through intimate chance encounters whether in the street or in a home—where the living room forms a site of discourse and new imaginaries. At a different scale, Katharina Rohde focuses on curating the urban arena, as a site for host–citizen and host–guest encounters, across cities such as Johannesburg and Berlin. Co-created intersections, such as Collaborative Pop-Up Restaurants and street performances, which draw on such existing practices as boxing, provide alternative sites of pluralist co-habitation.

Host–guest relations reveal different pressures at the state level, especially in the context of protracted displacement, as explored by Elisabeth Yarbakhsh’s contribution. She examines Derrida’s reflections on hospitality through the strained relations between Iranian citizen-hosts and Afghan refugee-guests—some of whom have been in Iran over generations, with limited access to rights and protection. The investigation focuses the shifting scales between the national juridical framework of asylum and the domestic expression of initial welcome of the guest—to share food around the sofreh (tablecloth). She explores opportunities for a guest who is denied the possibility of transformation into fellow citizen and instead becomes ‘hostage’ to a narrative of ‘guestness’. Addressing host–guest relations more broadly, Benjamin Gray investigates the opportunities and limits of ancient polis (city-state) citizenship-grants and cosmopolitan approaches to it. His critique of Agamben’s discourse on such issues is the starting point for Camillo Boano’s response to the paper, which employs a spatialising approach—questioning where the city ends and the camp begins—to overcome parameters of nation-state epistemologies.

6. Materiality and Spatiality

These exchanges raise questions about the diverse forms of materiality and spatiality of displacement across time. Material traces of displacement, whether as objects, structures or the landscape, are notoriously difficult to identify in the ancient context, in part, because people who have to flee and need to be on the move take few possessions with them, and what is brought on the journey may not identify the custodian as coming from elsewhere. While there may be archaeological traces of continuing socio-cultural practices with links to an origin-home and a diasporic community, the circumstances of those who engage with them, whether displaced or not, are difficult to identify. There is no equivalent to the material and digital footprint of the extensive paperwork and documents charting displacement today—which may also not remain beyond this century.

In terms of the built environment, the evidence of rapid abandonment and destruction at ancient sites could signal that its population was displaced. There are also some sites that show the need for hurried construction, but no direct evidence of purpose-built enclosures for accommodating displaced people, as distinct from, for example, ancient sanctuaries, which included accommodation facilities that we know were also used by asylum seekers. Segregation in the ancient Mediterranean context is visible in terms of status but not physical presence. Exiles and asylum seekers, if not denied entry, lived among other inhabitants in the cities and their surrounding landscapes; as such, there is no equivalent to asylum detention centres or refugee camps. It is telling, therefore, that a substantial number of Catalyst pieces focus on architecture and the built environment of the present day, designed by or for people who are marginalised, displaced or both. The transformation of the refugee camp—intended as a short-term solution—into an intergenerational site of inhabitation is confronted directly by Petti and also in Boano’s response piece to Gray, who challenge in their different ways the dichotomy between city and camp. Samar Maqusi’s Catalyst piece also addresses this by charting the constrained spaces and planning impositions in the refugee camps in Lebanon. On the spectrum between city and informal settlement are occupations, townships and favelas—solutions created in the face of precarity to counteract systemic exclusion and violence. Examples of this are the occupation of a disused site in Belo Horizonte, transformed into Dandara (Soares Lopes, Ribeiro and Oelze), or the creative use of in-between spaces and rooftops as gathering sites for activities ‘On the Slab’ in Sao Paolo (Nobre, Kazuo Nakano).

These sites, more than physical manifestations of Sassen’s ‘systemic edge’, encapsulate diverse forms of agency that allow for making meaningful lives within conditions of precarity (Sassen 2014). Isayev investigates possibilities for its overcoming and subversion through the relationship between ancient wandering and today’s permanent temporariness. The historically contingent approaches to the meaning of land, and its connection to citizenship and belonging, creates clashes in our understanding of the condition(s). Spatially, the place of exclusion in the current world of nation-states is significantly greater than inclusion. Thus, Isayev observes that where past narratives of displacement focus on the inability to return, today, the focus is on non-arrival. The way that both of these reverberate in the experience of people whose native lands have been colonised is viscerally exposed in the response piece by the poets Paul Collis and Paul Magee. In their dialogue on Non-Return and Non-Arrival in Aboriginal Australia, which moves through landscape and memory, they confront the possibilities of return to (a) country never left.

Dialogue IV: Meaningful Life and Place

Gerawork T. Gizaw: Actually, all of my explanation here is based on experience and my wild imagination. This is what I thought when I think of displacement and the waiting. It brings the issue of home, host, place of belonging, migration, especially the word non-arrival and non-return. It’s because, these [concepts] assume a constant place exists. But the term “mobility” transcends that, transcends boundaries. But the issue of displacement and placement is within the scope of boundary, the issue of host, even home, is within the scope of boundary. From my [00:26:00] practical experience, the issue of home, place of belonging, are not tied with specific place. They come from the experience and the way we attach our feelings to it. So that’s why I say mobility may be a more favourable word to my experience than the term displacement.

Elena Isayev: I’ll have to think about what we’ve inadvertently done in trying to open something up. It sounds like maybe we could have actually shut things down because of the assumptions we’re making of the starting point that you just described.

Evan Jewell: And what is place, like the role of place I think seems quite important there. We’ve, maybe [00:27:00] overemphasized that from a particular mindset.

Marcia C. Schenck: I think it comes back to what we’re writing against, right? Because we’re writing against this bias of stasis or sedentarism. And because that is what we’re trying to open up, we come back to it through the back door. And with non-arrival or non-return, I don’t think we have to necessarily refer to the place of origin. I think there’s a way to speak about that in cycles rather than to go back to one particular place in a linear account. So, like being cognizant of the fact that historical figures or mythical figures move through different places and perhaps redefine what being at home means, as Gera was just saying, that there is an attachment of feelings towards a particular place, rather than the place in itself, necessarily. And so then we can still keep the ‘non-arrival’ and the ‘non-return’ as metaphors to talk about this, but making it more explicit that we’re not referring to the origin or the place of birth, but that the origin narrative itself could be something that shifts over time.

Elena Isayev: I think Gera in one of our conversations much earlier on, you touched on this, but I don’t think we had time to explore it. So if you want to start us off on this now, about meaningful life in the meantime. And I think you challenged the notion of “in the meantime”. I don’t know if you wanted to say a bit more on that, which seems to tie to exactly what we’re talking about here, but we can move on to a different issue.

Gerawork T. Gizaw: No problem. But would you please clarify [what you mean] when you say “meaningful life”?

Elena Isayev: Yeah, so it’s about challenging the idea that people are living in liminal spaces and in limbo, which is part of what the conversation we’ve just been having is about, but trying to recognize that life lived wherever one is living, even if it’s to do with non-arrival—between non-arrival and non-return, is [00:30:00] also a life that is meaningful. But, it could be attached to the wandering state in the way you’re saying as well.

Gerawork T. Gizaw: Okay. I might put it like this, when I think of a meaningful life in that context, which as you said, is in limbo, what opportunities are there that makes my activity, my actual thinking meaningful, that is the question that I ask. So the life which is meaningful to me may not be meaningful for others based on their experience, whatever it is. So there are things that each one brings that are meaningful to them/her/him. I read a book written by a Holocaust survivor,5 who [00:31:00] created a very good meaning and came up with psychotherapeutic techniques. I understand that, we can bring out any meaning from every situation, but the problem here is that the meaningful life that one wants and creating meaning because of certain situations are two different things. For example, for me, based on the situations that are imposed on me, I have something that I call a meaningful life. Let’s say, for example, based on my background, based on my career experience, there is something that I can offer to my colleagues who are living here. That gives me meaning, but it doesn’t mean that I should live like the others because that may not give me meaning and even may create more suffering. People create different meaning based on their own experience. In some cases, some people’s experiences are unthinkable, [00:32:00] to me, I ask them how do they do such a thing? That is because I don’t have those experiences, and I don’t see those opportunities. So to answer it straightforward, yes, as you said it everywhere, a meaningful life can be created. But what it is, depends on individual circumstance, knowledge, experience, and the belief and value system that one has embraced.

7. Geographies of Displacement and De-placement

Displacement challenges us to forgo the fixity of place, to ‘unmap’ the hegemonic understanding of space. Catalyst pieces, such as Segatto’s, challenge us to de-centre sites we might typically look to for displacement, or re-imagine the camp spaces where the experience of permanent temporariness plays out. Many pieces, while focusing on exclusion, challenge the binary of internal and external spaces of displacement destabilising the border: from Gray’s examination of poleis-in-exile, existing within other poleis, to Jewell’s examination of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of domestic displacement of subaltern groups. The zones of displacement are often flipped. Some geographies do, however, maintain their borderland characteristics across time, as seen in Moralee’s piece on Byzantine borderlands and the village war in Syria, especially the role of chemical warfare, both in the past and in the more recent Syrian civil war. His exploration brings into discussion the 2014 genocide perpetrated by ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) against the Êzidis, and creates space for a dialogue with Sinjar Lives/Shingal Lives, a community-driven oral history project and the folklorist Christine Robins. Their response to Moralee’s piece opens up further lines of discussion on the political significance of the elusive victim voice.

Beyond territorial enclosures within land, we observed that the island, in particular, arose as a recursive geography of displacement across multiple contributions. This is physically instantiated by the historical cases of the islands of Delos and Chagos, elucidated by Eliza Gettel and Irial Glynn’s response to her chapter. Beyond its geographical being, the threads of the ‘island condition’, as Padilla Peralta calls it, emerge most clearly in his chapter’s understanding of the figuration of differentiated forms of citizenship as an archipelago of islands, across which the displaced refugee or immigrant has to island-hop in the pursuit of full citizenship. However, as he points out, this has very much become a repeating island, a repeating experience which constitutes a central anxiety of displacement—the non-arrival at citizenship’s door. Physical islands, as seen in the case of Tuvalu, Fiji, also come into focus through Carol Farbotko’s response to Perego and Scopacasa’s study on climate change and displacement in Roman Italy. In a place like Tuvalu—under increasing threat from climate change—the act of creating artificial islands, as part of land reclamation efforts to counter its effects, becomes a colonial act of displacement of indigenous culture. As a recursive geography, the island seemingly speaks to the physical and figurative barriers which facilitate displacements in the first place, before, and also beyond, the borders of the nation state.

8. Reception and Practice—Decolonising the Classics

Just as the field of Classics has recently been undergoing a reckoning with its racist and colonial heritages and legacies, our volume aimed to extend beyond simply showcasing research on ancient displacement and, instead, transition to praxis—to rethink the Classics classroom and its subjectivities, in and beyond the walls of institutions. An important consideration in working towards that goal was the question of how to recognise and value diverse lived experiences as knowledge. From the perspective of the teacher, Lisa Trentin’s piece investigated pedagogical ethics through a critical reflection of her own teaching in Chios and Athens, of a group of Syrian youth who have been displaced. In particular, her piece grapples with the issue of how to create possibilities for students to take ownership of their own stories and the cultural heritage of the places they had been displaced from, while simultaneously confronting their confusion at the way Western cultural institutions and bodies such as UNESCO take interest in their heritage and fetishize their displacement. It confronts the problems of a fixation on classical antiquity and its destruction in war zones such as Syria, at times ignoring its local custodians and other local priorities.

Thus, as many of us teach subjects on ancient migration, we must ask: how do we approach an ethical pedagogy, especially when the class may include colleagues and students who are displaced? This is addressed by Zena Kamash, who, in her response to Trentin, draws attention to the need for acknowledging subjectivity in the classroom: “As a person of mixed heritage (both British and Iraqi), this anxiety resonates: I am neither one nor the other, but, crucially, I have come to realise that I do not need to be; I can be me, simultaneously similar and different to those around me” (p. 2). The critical reflection on positioning of the self is also a focus in the realm of research, not least when Padilla Peralta, in his piece, highlights and explicitly invokes his own psychobiography, but does so on his own terms, in a way that resists the typical demand for the re-performance of one’s story of displacement.

Dialogue V: Turning the Lens

Elena Isayev: So what work do you feel remains to be done that this volume does not or cannot do? And what might be included in the next iteration of this manifesto?

Gerawork T Gizaw: Okay. Let me start. I may say something related to the question that says: this volume may make an impact on academia, but does it serve any purpose for displaced people or community to your mind? Yes, absolutely. As I already mentioned, it’s helping me to reflect on my own experience. Some of the past stories that are mentioned are good lenses for me to see what’s going on here. Even knowing what was happening in the past by itself is consoling, so it really serves us, but it can also be improved. Or in the [01:14:00] next round of dialogue, it can be expanded. For example, where I would like to expand on it is in relation to the regime. Because most of the conversation is now directed towards those who are victims or displaced, it should also be directed to people who are the actors; they are many, and there are stories there. So if all sides of stories come out and we see the whole interaction there, it may become more meaningful and we may understand the reality in a more complete form.

[…]

Gerawork T. Gizaw: I got so many [00:48:00] important things from the volume that made me reflect deeply, not to mention that it considered permanent temporariness as a regime, which I didn’t see in such a way. And it is the reality, which I fail to understand it in that way. Yes, it’s a system that’s why it has been sustained for so long. That was quite interesting for me, but it brought another question. Who are the actors in the regime? How can we express them? How can we see the dynamics, the chemistry, are areas to work on. I have to explore more there. Actually, the sides of the people who are displaced, who are in limbo, most of the characteristics are mentioned there, but the regime cannot be built with a displaced person only. So there [00:49:00] are missing pieces there to consider it as a regime, that may be the remaining task.

9. History: Reflections on Agency, Power and Belonging

The lens of displacement allows us to situate historical and modern concerns across the longue durée, thus questioning the norm, thereby destabilising it and that which is deemed marginal and exceptional. The Humanities perspective allows us to consider what is at stake in the deployment of such labels—ones that do not in themselves define experience. Within this volume, there is accordingly an underlying resistance to speak for, or speak ‘on behalf of’, people experiencing displacement—even as many of the authors are displaced. This is distinct from individuals and groups expressing shared challenges and opportunities that characterise the condition of displacement under which they exist, and the forms of its overcoming. The voices that speak in this volume, whether of the current age or the past, whether historic or mythical, and whether through word, object or landscape, are those of complex heroes, of victims that refuse such a label, of actors whose agency officially does not exist, of colonisers who themselves were forced into dispersion—they tell surprising stories and ones without clear ends.

One such story is that recounted by Alfred Hirt, of the cohabitation on the Egyptian desert frontier between the locals and Dacians—the latter having been expelled from their homes by the Romans and forced into joining armies to control such populations on the frontier. Leveraging epigraphic sources, usually used to support ethnically divided narratives, Hirt reveals how the shared experience of mining, road building and the hazards of living under Imperial rule led to new shared forms of belonging, while still maintaining distinct identities. In some ways there are resonances with later forms of ‘settler colonialism’, a subject that the historical articles in the volume do not address directly—except in the reception of the Roman model in settler colonial models in Britain and Australia, for instance (see Jewell). What historical examples have to offer to such a discourse is a fundamental question of the volume, and this is directly addressed by Susanne Lachenicht in her questioning of what can be learned from past displacements. She stresses that such discourses are always historically contingent, and that the choice of categories used for historical investigation are never neutral, hence the need to be wary of presentism in any comparative approach. Fundamental for critical historical analysis is an understanding of how the specific is embedded in the general and the inter-relationship between them.

These observations can equally be applied to the term ‘displacement’ itself, which is not to insist that there would have been through time a phenomenon that would have been recognised as displacement per se. The multiplicity of experiences presented in the volume challenge us to reconsider the appropriateness of the term as a way to bring together these different experiences and to consider what other connectivities between them we may focus on instead. In part, then, one ‘manifesto’ of the volume and its contributions is to address precisely that question; it is our hope that the methodological interventions of the volume have facilitated its interrogation.

Dialogue VI: Across the longue durée

Marcia C. Schenck: What I want start with is actually Susanne Lachenicht’s contribution, and that’s because I’m currently based in Germany and I’m German and she starts, basing her paper in the German context inspired by 2015, which was a year that saw a lot of arrivals in Germany. I really like that she starts framing her introduction by saying, yes, 890,000 people arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany seeking refuge and asylum in 2015. In the same year though, there were also 864,000 US citizens that moved to Germany and almost [00:42:00] 600,000 people, left the country within the same year. So, just this framing is not the usual framing. Usually you just get one number, which is arrival of asylum seekers. And I think just the framing of the picture brings us back perhaps to the point that Gera made in the very beginning, the picture of mobility, and this isn’t even the complete picture, but just starting to sketch out the picture of mobility in Germany in 2015, a little bit actually helps us to put into context numbers. And I think this also brings us to a larger point of the volume. Because there’s a tendency, especially in migration studies, but also in the media reporting on people who move, to focus on the numbers and not on the individual human stories [00:43:00]. The very journal in which you’re publishing is called Humanities, right? So the very approach you’re taking to this is human-centred, and I think this is also extremely important, for us to be able to connect better.

And so, to come back to Susanne Lachenicht’s contribution, she asked, and I quote (p. 1): Can we compare present migrations with other, past migrations? And what can we learn from this? She is not the only contributor who asked this question, but she does it [00:46:00] very explicitly. I think what we can learn from this is that history can be the reminder of how things like borders, citizenship, and movement work very differently in very different government structures, economic structures, geographical structures. Tracing changing structures over time can be a reminder that the present moment and the nation-state system in which we’re living is not how it has to be. So it opens up possibilities to think differently or imagine a different future. And I think that to me would be what, across these different contributions that I’ve read, is the big takeaway. So we don’t necessarily learn from history. [00:47:00] We don’t take a one-on-one lesson, but we do take this understanding that whatever categories we use today and however they might work in a systemic level today is just one way of them being not necessarily the way they have to be. And so really open up a different way to collectively think about a different future.

10. Methodology—Dialogic, Multi-Temporal Form

Part of the intervention of this volume comes from its own heterodox structure, authorship and publishing process. The dialogic structure of the volume was conceived in three entangled parts: (1) the Catalyst authors responded to our own manifesto proposal; (2) historians then responded in turn to these Catalysts; (3) these were then responded to by researchers working in another temporal and/or geographical field. This allowed for approaches on the issue of displacement from diverse starting points, as well as a dialogical co-authorship, thus preventing the insularity of viewpoints and balkanization of the different knowledges, including lived, professional, academic and artistic, among others. We envisaged the volume and its dialogues as a process of co-creation whereby lived, grounded experience could be translated into textual forms. The fictional and the imaginary were brought in as having a bearing on the understanding of actual historical lives—and life stories—thus providing a diversity of experiences of displacement.

The process facilitated organic structuring, whereby the temporal order of things was sometimes inverted: the longer paper dealt with more recent displacement (Lachenicht, Yarbakhsh), while the respondent paper entered into the conversation from the world of Classics and Ancient History (Baroud, Kasimis). All of this was made possible by the Humanities journal’s dynamic and flexible publishing process, allowing peer-reviewed publication on a rolling basis, which proved essential for a rich dialogue to emerge. The open access format of the volume was also essential, meaning that it could reach a whole host of readers who may not otherwise have had access. All of these elements therefore functioned at a structural and methodological level to facilitate the manifesto-like interventions we sought to make.

Dialogue VII: Refusing Boundaries

Marcia C. Schenck: And I think this brings me to answering [00:19:00] the question that Evan posed in the beginning, what did I really like about this Special Issue? To me what’s really, innovative about it is this ability to read and explore across so many boundaries. So it’s an Issue that brings together people across disciplinary boundaries, across temporal boundaries, across boundaries of being practitioners or academics, across geographical boundaries. And it really enables, in my mind, very unique conversations. Because this is not something that you see often … something that bridges that many boundaries. We’re quite good at creating boundaries around disciplines, around time periods and staying within our siloed conversations. And I think this is really a very brave attempt to tear down those walls and actually have a conversation all together. And so the way that you [00:20:00] started off with these very concrete Catalysts by people who are practically and currently engaging in creating a city space or, doing architectural work in refugee camps or working with refugees in different cities. So very practical embodied experiences to start off a broader conversation, that feeds into more scholarly discourses actually, I think worked really well.

[…]

Gerawork T. Gizaw: As Marcia said earlier, one of the good things of this paper is it brings diverse conversations and different cases together, even challenges are there. And through all those interactions, one can [00:34:00] see the collaborations that have been going on. Regarding the approach, I have one issue. It says, this is not the same as letting contemporary [00:35:00] concerns drive what we research in history, but rather recognizing that our questions of the past are framed in the present through its categories and lenses. As I said earlier, my experience forces me to expect solutions, I wish that we could create a question for our current concern and look back for solutions in the past. For me, that may be more helpful, it could even be a way that we express our responsibilities.

Elena Isayev: Yes. In other conversations, which we’ve been having together from ROUTES,6 about boat crossings, we are hopefully trying to do that or at least to edge some way towards that, which is about, how you pose such questions and allow research to [00:36:00] more directly address contemporary concerns.

11. Conclusions

The dynamic process of editing and publishing this volume, in dialogue with more than 30 contributors, means we are in a very different place now to where we started six years ago. While we did not intend in any way to be comprehensive in the subjects covered, a number of themes that require more urgent attention, especially from historians, consistently emerged through the dialogues. All authors’ and, especially, respondents’ contributions crucially highlight both what needs more investigation, and also new pathways that now need further exploration. The following are just a few exemplary provocations on subjects where there is a lot more to be done.

Environmental concerns were only considered explicitly by Socpacasa and Perego’s investigation of the occupation of marginal landscapes, and the interplay of socio-political and environmental forces in shaping the actions of subaltern groups on the move. Similarly, gender is only considered in passing in this volume. It comes into view through Medea’s predicament in Isayev’s chapter on wandering and, more directly, in Demetra Kasimis’ response to Yarbakhsh.7 The representation of people seeking refuge and the role of gender has come into stark view in the very different ways that the media and policy have been swayed by people fleeing wars in the Middle East over the last decade, and those fleeing the war in Ukraine now.

The authors have confronted material traces of displacement but not those that are written on the body. These are significant in, for example, bioarchaeological methods, which bring forth new and diverse questions. The challenge is to ensure that the questions posed are not such that they further reify divisive strategies. Here, Humanities approaches are critical. A number of papers touched on the meaning of the indigenous and aboriginal through time, yet only the dialogue by Magee and Collis made it the focus of their response. They introduce diverse perceptions of the world, as viewed through indigenous value systems and approaches to human intersections and movements through the landscape. The momentum exists for showcasing and incorporating these diverse value systems further, as, for example, recently recognised in the IPCC report—The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.8 Crucially, we have only begun to ask how the Humanities’ approaches and methods can contribute to the discourse on displacement beyond the academy. How these investigations can feed back into the discourse on the street and into policy requires much more work, not least because what we have not addressed are the root causes of the displacement, and in whose interest it is to keep them alive.

Dialogue VIII: Manifestos for Future Work

Marcia C. Schenck: And now where do we go from here? Three things came to my mind. The first, because I’m a teacher, I think this Special Issue would be really, really fantastic to use in the classroom, specifically those contributions that bring the present and antiquity together. Because this is a combination that I rarely see in the literature, and I think it would be really fruitful in helping students to question the [00:44:00] categories that they come across now, like passports or borders, when they see how differently these things worked over time. And the second thing would be to bring the Special Issue back to the communities in which the contributions originated. This could be the Dandara community in Brazil, or it could be the camps in the West Bank, or it could be the different universities at which people work. Maybe some of these conversations could be recorded, maybe some of them could be collected. And then we have sort of this meta level of the meta level, right? So like how do different people in different locations now read this material and engage with it, I think would be super interesting to follow up with and have that as an addendum or something to this Special Issue. And the third thing is that I was wondering, because some of our work aims to unsettle the narratives that we [00:45:00] see replicated in the media, and I was wondering how do we reach with that kind of work also people who write for the media? So would that be a press toolkit? Would that be a special event for journalists? To me that [reaching journalists] would be really, really fruitful, just because the different contributions unsettle so many of these narratives that I think a lot of people have internalized when they think about migration, including also journalists.

I love the framework and I think it would be great if a future volume or follow up work could actually address all historical periods. And then also in terms of geographical dispersion, Asia I think is a blind spot right now. Then I also would love to see [01:17:00] a section added that thinks about, alternative imaginations of the future throughout history. So, we have Tangible Creations, Volatile Concepts and Critical Approaches. And the imaginings [historical ideas about different futures]—because we’re interested in the study of history to allow us to think about the world in which we live anew. I’d be really interested in how did historical actors throughout all these different time periods think the world anew? What kind of imaginations did they sustain about mobility in an imagined future at that point in time of writing? I think that would … help us do the work which we want to do with our deliberations of history in the present.

Evan Jewell: There’s so many things that have come out of here. I didn’t intervene before, but I mean, Marcia I hadn’t thought about, the potential for this to reach journalists who, even in my own paper, that’s something that I came across a lot was the discourse of these metaphors of waste. And these were also used in ancient contexts and how they just continue to be picked up. But how do we communicate this kind of thing to the media? I think that’s a big challenge for us as academics and for displaced individuals and communities. And, I don’t know how we can team up in a sense but holding a media training workshop of some kind. Information session would be interesting. It’s given me ideas, [01:20:00] and your perspective is such an important one in terms of really cutting through I think a lot of the academic discourse we can get caught up in … in a certain framework, right? I think it will allow us to move forward even in the volume that we’re currently editing.

Elena Isayev: I just wanted to follow up what Evan was saying. It’s not just that it cuts across academic discourse, but the conversation is a very different kind of academic discourse, which is inclusive in a positive sense, but also inclusive by highlighting that—one hears it a lot, the words privilege—that we are all in an equal plane, but are we? [Yet] saying we are part of the same continuum. So then it’s a question of where within that continuum there is that difference. Like the displacement and mobility issue that you [Gera] highlighted at the beginning [that one is part of the other rather than distinct from each other]. How do we do this… recognizing that this is not about a them and an us, but where we stand on that continuum.

Through the provocations in this volume, we have sought to collapse dichotomies and expose continuities across social frameworks and practice, challenging the idea of the ‘norm’, through opening and critiquing such concepts as exceptionalism, statehood, citizenship, place and the meaning of time. Through the stimulus by catalysts, detailed studies and respondents, the volume frames a dialogue across practices, disciplines and temporalities. In so doing, we hope that it provokes future work—hence manifestos—not only in the historical and literary fields, but in wider research and practice.