Seminars and Workshops

Decolonizing Theory, Challenging the Nomad: Refugee Women in Greece tell their story

Modern Greek Studies at Oxford

Thursday, 24 October 2019, 5 pm, Ground Floor Lecture Room 1, 47 Wellington Square

In this talk, I draw on my Leverhulme funded research project ‘Revisiting the nomadic subject’ https://mariatamboukou.org raising the question: can we still use the nomadic subject both as a figuration and as a name,​ a word, a descriptor in the era of the recent waves of forced displacement that have uprooted millions of people across the globe and have forced them to take up nomadic paths as the only feasible way of going on living? When the majority of these forced nomads is according to policy reports and the media ‘women travelling alone’, meaning women without the company of male guardians, how can the feminist notion of the nomadic subject enable us to grasp the lived experiences of women on the move? In the context of decolonizing theory, how do uprooted and wandering women challenge our perception of the subject of feminism and force us to reflect on the constitutive power of language as practice and of naming as a political act.