In the course Geography of Social Exclusion 2022, there will be some fascinating and intriguing guest lectures coming up next month, which will probably interest many. Hence, the Social Exclusion program is inviting any interested individuals to join the upcoming guest lectures. Please send an email to socialex@abo.fi , to receive a zoom link for the seminars.
Check below to see the dates for the different guest lectures and a brief description of the course.
Course description
The concept of social exclusion is very difficult to define. It is a relatively new concept and it is very strongly connected with the national and regional social reality wherein border and boundaries play a great role in determining people’s wellbeing, existence and access. In the course borders will be interrogated in a different way both as a physical space and an ideological one. In geopolitics, they are fought for, guarded and crossed. Borders are thus understood as social constructions and a site of exclusion that articulate dominant ideas about ―who and what belongs in particular places and the kinds of activities and practices that belong to the place. Borders are fundamentally boundaries and they do not only shape national sovereignty but separate the everyday experiences of locales. Boundaries and borders as tools of social exclusion wherein individuals and groups struggle in the experience of reality. The boundary between the excluded and non-excluded may be seen as more or less permeable, depending on how easy it is to cross it. The degree of permeability of a boundary depends on the way it is constructed, namely on the markers employed to define it.
List of the guest lectures
February 1st Borders created by beauty standards
Guest Lecturer: Jasmin Slimani, project assistant at ÅAU
The guest lecture will cover issues of how the beauty standards in Finland create borders for Afro-Finnish women. This lecture will be centred around Jasmin’s Master’s thesis: Mirror, mirror on the wall, why am I not the fairest of them all? – an Afrocentric approach to the lack of representation of Afro-Finnish women within the Finnish beauty standard.
February 7th Anti-Blackness in Egypt: Between Stereotypes and Ridicule
Guest lecturer: Islam Bara’ah Sabry, project assistant at ÅAU
This Lecture will be centred around Islam’s Master’s thesis: Anti-Blackness in Egypt: Between Stereotypes and Ridicule: An Examination on the History of Colorism and the development of Anti-Blackness in Egypt.
February 8th Levantinism and Belonging
Guest lecturer: Sagy Watemberg, Izraeli PhD Candidate, Law and Study of Religions
Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff was born in the cosmopolitan city of Cairo, Egypt, to an Iraqi Jewish father and Tunisian Jewish mother. As a child she attended the French Mission Laïque School alongside Muslim and Christian children, thus speaking mostly in French as well as in English with her British nanny rather than her native languages of Arabic or Hebrew. As an adult she lived in Paris, the United States, and eventually returned to the Middle East to Israel. Therefore, her own experiences of belonging and not belonging, the heart-aching search for a “home” among her mixed and often conflicting identities of “East” and “West”, of colonised and coloniser, of riffs between religious and national borders fracturing the Middle East, lead her to formulate the concept of “Levantinization”. We can uncover the concept of Levantinization as a strong and intricate tool for understanding complex societies and reconciling these “opposing” shards of ourselves and of society.
February 14th Settler colonial frontier-making between Silicon Valley and Palestine/Israel
Guest lecturer: Antti Tarvainen, Doctoral Student in Global Development Studies. Helsinki Institute of Urban and Regional Studies (Urbaria). Doctoral Program in Political, Societal and Regional Change. Univeristy of Helsinki
This guest lecture will cover the concept of frontier (from settler colonial studies) and how it is useful in analyzing the racist and gendered state-making projects of innovation economy.
February 15th The exclusion and inclusion of Roma migrants in Helsinki from 2008-2016
Guest lecturer: Anca Enache, University of Helsinki.
February 21st Social exclusions in refugee contexts.
Guest lecturer: Eveliina Lyytinen, Migration Institute
This guest lecture will cover the following concepts: Welcomed to Finland as unaccompanied refugee minor / Unwelcomed by the state but welcomed by locals as an asylum-seeking man / Deported to Afghanistan and / Rewelcomed as an employer and a family member.
February 22nd Caste-anticaste and Social Exclusion of Muslims in India – by Dsilva Keshia
Guest Lecturer Dsilva Keshia, Doctoral student in the Doctoral Programme in Social Sciences. University of Helsink
This lecture will cover the following topics: An introduction to the caste system. Visual representations of gender and gender-based violence in the campaigns of gender organizations in India from an intersectional anti-casteist lens. India’s newly proposed citizenship act that seeks to deny citizenship to Muslims from India’s neighboring countries and also targets Muslims in India
February 28th Bridging the “us” and “them” silent borders in Finland
Guest lecture by Theresia Bilola, City of Turku