PAUL MECHERIL
What you fear is real? Logics of Affect and Power
17th of April, 18.00
Museum of Impossible Forms,
Kontula Shopping Centre, Keinulaudankuja 4 E, 2nd floor, lk 21, Helsinki

In migration discourses perceived threats are explicitly or implicitly called into being through texts and visual media representations. Methodologically I want to read this practice as constructed and staged scenarios of threat that develop their affective efficacy due to deep historical patterns of assertion and justification. The staging of threats can be described as a practice that represents an investment in the fight for a legitimate social order. I examine ‘the threat-scenarios’ as interventions whose meaning is defined by practices of real and symbolic in- and exclusions.

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Paul Mecheril, Dr. phil., Professor for Migration and Education, Departement for Pedagogy at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is head of the Center for Migration, Education and Cultural Studies. His main research interests include: migration and pedagogy, theory of racism, Cultural Studies, methodological questions of interpretative practices. He is the (co-)author of nine and (co-)editor of 26 books. Recently he editedHandbuch Migrationspädagogik (Beltz, 2016), co-edited Dämonisierung der Anderen. Rassismuskritik der Gegenwart (transcript, 2016, with María do Mar Castro Varela), andResistance. Subjects, Representations, Contexts (transcript 2017, with Martin Butler & and Lea Brenningmeyer).