“Il était un petit navire”: The refugee crisis, neo-orientalism, and the production of radical alterity

Abstract

In September 2015 Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Giorgos Tsimouris, Stavroula Pipyrou, and Daniel Knight were awarded funding by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to carry out a comparative study on what has come to be known as the refugee crisis in Greece and Italy. Titled “Transitory Lives: An Anthropological Research of the Mediterranean Migration Crisis,” the project is part of a larger ESRC research program and came in response to an urgent call to address the “Mediterranean Migration Crisis.” It brings together the universities of Durham, St. Andrews, Panteion, and Messina, academics, non-governmental organizations, and refugee associations from three countries in an effort to engage with a bottom-up approach to displacement. The main academic aim of the project is to challenge border intensification practices and question the distinctions being made currently in the deployment of the terms “migrants” and “refugees” and arguing in favor of a unified approach to systemic forms of political and economic violence.