Current Crises and the Rise of Xenophobia

About

h Amin's presentation will cover the turn to xenophobia in Europe and it will articulate an alternative politics of being European, one that works with difference and diversity as a resource for the future. The talk will outline the contours of the drift towards intolerance of the stranger and subaltern in different European countries and will argue that a new public sphere of negative feelings, fanned by fears of unemployment, uncertainty and insecurity, is becoming 'naturalised' across Europe, with some very worrying implications. Drawing on the work of the Forum of Concerned Citizens of Europe, and associated contributors to a special OpenDemocracy dossier in March 2011 on the Uses of Xenophobia in Europe, the talk will propose an alternative politics of hope, one that works with popular concerns, but tries to frame them in ways that make the future with the stranger felt as both natural and inevitable. It will argue that for this to happen, a strong sense of the shared and plural commons needs to be built, along with a functioning open European public sphere, and new interest in facing the future through diversity and with the stranger. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ash Amin is 1931 Professor of Geography at Cambridge University. He writes about race and multiculturalism, space and society, and democratic possibility in Europe. His next two books are Land of Stranger (Polity Press, 2012), which explores the status in the West today of the figure of the stranger, and Political Openings (Duke University Press, 2012, with Nigel Thrift), which outlines a new programme of thought and practice for the European Left.You can read Ash Amin's introduction to openDemocracy series at The Uses of XenophobiaRead Ash Amin's essay Xenophobic Europe for openDemocracy. Part of the terms & conditions series of events organised with artist Margareta Kern in collaboation with Iniva