Date: 15 March 2024 (Friday)

Time: 2 PM CET  (9 PM HKT)
Title: Survival and Witness at Europe’s Border: The Afterlives of a Disaster
Speaker: Karina Horsti (Visiting Professor, University of Minnesota Twin Cities)

 

Abstract:

Mass deaths are an ongoing issue at Europe’s external borders. Border deaths do not “happen”, but are “made” in a complex, diffused, and contested global context. In this webinar, I first present key findings of my ethnographic research that centers on the afterlives of a specific disaster, the so-called Strage di Lampedusa, the sinking of a boat on 3 October 2013 off the island of Lampedusa, Italy. The mediatized disaster produced a kaleidoscope of afterlives that have taken on different forms depending on the position of the witness and the type of witnessing. I then discuss more in detail how enumeration shapes representation and memorialization. The dominant representation of the disaster is the figure of the victims, 368. While numbers sanitize individuality of loss, the number given to each dead body has become meaningful for the families. It is often a clue they follow to confirm the death.

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About the speaker:

Karina Horsti is Visiting Professor at University of Minnesota (2023–2025) and University Lecturer in Cultural Policy at University of Jyväskylä. Her research focuses on migration, media, memory politics and culture. She is the author of Survival and Witness at Europe’s Border: The Afterlives of a Disaster (Cornell University Press, 2023).