Paper details

Paper authors	Jasmin Tabaković
In panel on	Resisting Border Violence: The Role of Civil Society, Local Actors, and Researchers
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person & Online

Abstract

This poetic–analytical piece advances intimate fragmentary ethnography: an anticolonial, feminist practice of living-researching-writing with that stays close to everyday intimacies while foregrounding refusal, responsibility, and care. It is grounded in long-term research, and personal affinity and proximity, with people living the reverberations of mass violence—among them those forcibly exiled from Višegrad, Eastern Bosnia, to Belgium and the Netherlands in the 1990s—and in sustained friendships with people from Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, and elsewhere who continue to navigate Belgium’s documentation regime alongside local activists and care providers. The piece turns to a composite scene in an Antwerp home where Eid al-Fitr and Nawrouz are celebrated together: plates of Qabeli palaw passed hand to hand, recited prayers, improvised songs, mistranslated jokes. Such affective acts of solidarity and care operate as momentary counter-borders that puncture state practices of containment and exclusion—without romanticizing or collapsing difference. By tarrying with the negative and with non-coincidence, I ask what active listening demands, which responsibilities are ours, and how complicities must be named. The argument is an ethico-epistemic imperative: to negate the negationist logic of research that becomes complicit in bordering and bureaucratic cruelty, and to center refusal as method and mode of resistance. Hybrid in form—part analysis, part poetry, part witness—the piece seeks to honor lives shaped by genocidal ongoingness and aftermath and administrative violence while remaining accountable to infrastructures of care that the state withholds. It thus renders visible refusals and solidarities that persist at dinner tables and in shared rooms, where dispersed geographies converge without being subsumed.

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