Paper details
| Paper authors | fiona murphy |
| In panel on | Resisting Border Violence: The Role of Civil Society, Local Actors, and Researchers |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
This presentation draws on The Treaty of Dingle, a documentary poetry project that traces fractured geographies of citizenship, statelessness, and solidarity through the lens of Ireland’s long entanglement with displacement, empire, and refusal. Beginning with the 1529 treaty signed between the Kingdom of Ireland and the Spanish Empire—an early, fragile gesture toward international refuge—the project spirals forward to examine contemporary forms of border violence and belonging in the context of global forced migration. It asks what it means to seek sanctuary on a continent increasingly defined by its exclusions.
Composed as a long-form poem grounded in fieldwork with displaced people, solidarity groups, and grassroots organisers across Ireland and beyond, the work experiments with the documentary form to give voice to those navigating the sharp edges of exile, bureaucratic containment, and asylum regimes. It aims not to render border violence comprehensible, but to unsettle its legibility—offering instead what Glissant calls a poetics of relation, where opacity, echo, and interruption hold analytical weight.
I will present the work through a reading of selected poetic fragments interwoven with critical reflections on creative ethnographic method. In doing so, I argue that documentary poetry offers a mode of scholarly resistance—refusing state grammars of humanitarianism and recentering the affective, the fugitive, and the fragmentary as legitimate sites of knowledge. What would it mean to write not about borders, but against them? How might poetic method allow us to witness both the violence and the vitality of those who insist on moving otherwise?
