You’re warmly invited to attend the following work-in-progress sessions:

Jackson Sebola - "Dis(S)placement: Forced Removals of Tshikota's Community (1930s-1990s) and Earlier Tshirululuni (1800s)"

• Monday October 6, 13.00-14.45

The article of Jackson Sebola investigates forced removal policies of apartheid South Africa. Employing a qualitative historical approach that integrates indigenous oral histories and interview methodologies, this study investigates the multiple displacements experienced by the Tshikota community. The findings indicate that these removals amounted to more than simple administrative relocations; they were part of a deliberate and cumulative disarticulation of (s)place, systematically severing the connections among people, land, and spirit. I propose the Dis(s)placement Theory concept as a sub-branch of (S)place Theory, arguing that each displacement dismantled the socio-spiritual infrastructure that supported community identity, belonging, and indigenous residency, progressively eroding residents' right of being and ontological density. 

Megan Bradley - "Relief empire: Racial aphasia, colonial unknowing and international organizations in the global governance of refugees"

• Tuesday October 7, 9:15 - 10:45

This article deploys the concepts of racial aphasia and colonial unknowing to retheorize international organisations’ roles in the global governance of refugees. While UNHCR—originally mandated to support select European refugees—has ascended to the alpha position in global refugee governance, international organizations focused on non-white refugees have been relegated to lower rungs of the ladder or shuttered and shunted to the margins of history.

This article explores this dynamic through analysis of the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), an international organization charged with responding to mass displacement in the Korean War. Probing the “unknowing” of UNKRA and its institutional failures sheds light on the ways in which racialized hierarchies and racial aphasia actively structure the refugee regime.

Keyvan Dorostkar - "Not a Zero-Sum Game: Re-Conceptualising the Relationship Between Fairness and Efficiency in Asylum Procedures"

• Tuesday October 7, 11:15 - 12:45

The paper of Dorostkar seeks to set a new research agenda, exploring how fairness and efficiency in refugee decision-making can be simultaneously advanced through an evidence-based approach to policy design. The paper gathers data on over 200,000 individual asylum application lodged in Australia from 2013 to 2023, following each across the entire process. The core aim of this paper is to understand empirically how long asylum applications take to be finalised across each stage of the process and examine whether the restriction of procedural fairness rights throughout the procedures results in faster processing. Specifically, this paper examines the effect of restrictive procedures on the duration of asylum procedures. The empirical analysis in this paper challenges the long-held narrative and assumptions by states regarding the necessity of restrictive asylum procedures to increase efficiency.