Migration Narratives / Historical and Theoretical Frameworks
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Life Beyond Emergency is a pedagogy predicated upon migrant life.1 The course foregrounds the perspectives of refugees and scholars with insight into refugee life.2 For its duration on campuses where it was offered, student protests for a free Palestine and against genocide in Gaza took to task geopolitical structures predicated on the liberal principles behind humanitarianism.
Growing out of fourteen years of research in archives and environments in Africa, Asia, and Europe—particularly in the longstanding refugee camps of Dadaab, Kenya, and on lands crossing Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia—Life Beyond Emergency is rooted in understandings of an architecture of migration.3 If this concept implies the confining architectures of border detention, such environments reveal underlying structures determined by migrants, who find themselves constructing ecosystems and effecting settlement in putatively temporary settings. This paradoxical “humanitarian settlement” occurs in emergency environments defined by urgency and provisionality. Yet, in Dadaab, humanitarian settlement has resulted in monumental and historically grounded form and aesthetics. Dadaab’s histories, moreover, are hardly provincial, but instead raise concerns common to all histories of modernity: particularly an intertwining of migration and settlement iterative of a condition across centuries.
We are taught not to see aesthetic regimes in the humanitarian camp, and to dismiss camps as nondiscursive structures. Yet, Dadaab’s constructed environment has consisted at once of structures built using intergenerational hereditary knowledge of craft traditions as well as those adapted or repurposed from humanitarian waste. It has been entirely expressive of refugee life. How to bring such places differently into the narrative? From an early 2020 Instagram exhibition in the weeks inaugurating the Covid-19 pandemic—during which emergency was visited, in swift and harsh ways, even upon corners of the world sheltered from it for generations—a pedagogical project was born.4
Life Beyond Emergency moves out of the historical and theoretical frameworks of humanitarianism as it has been discussed and practiced and into those of constructed environments as they have been lived. Its pedagogical aim is to unsettle the rigid ontology and episteme imposed by humanitarian subjecthood—a state of emergency that has become all but universal, from which few of us depart. That state is rooted in the construction of “emergency territory,” one formation of which can be traced to the British Empire, reconstructed again and again in the Kenya Colony’s Mau Mau detentions, the postcolonial Northeast Frontier District “shifta” incarcerations, and the sedentarization of pastoralists in the Dadaab refugee camps.5 Emergency territory extends colonial practices into postcolonial time and space, well into the present day. We have all been made to live under curfew, whether we inhabit a refugee camp, endure a pandemic, or survive, even thrive, within the spatiotemporal rule of modern life. Life Beyond Emergency dislodges the rule of the clock and unfreezes emergency in spaces that avail themselves of no past or future, only a fraught, urgent present in which we are told we must shelter in place.
Generations of scholars have thought critically about humanitarianism. During the decolonizations, neoliberal and neocolonial economic structural adjustments, and rising bipolar geopolitical alliances of the 1960s and 1970s, bands of professionals in healthcare, the press, and architecture and planning sought to defend solidarity by eliding or overriding the border, forging a sans-frontières movement.6 As a “new world order” found its footing in the 1990s, a robust critique of humanitarianism was catalyzed by angry aid workers—who were coping, on the ground and in the halls of power, with internationalist and imperialist violations of sovereignty in Somalia and Bosnia forged in their name, and a genocide in Rwanda met by former colonizing states coldly assuming no political or ethical responsibility.7 A shifting Westphalian order remade itself in a new image as a warrior against the intractable specter of “terror,” as a liberal regime translated itself into a neoliberal one through interventions rooting themselves in the realm of the moral. As the borders of the former Soviet Union and a bipolar world were displaced by limitless capitalism, so were the limits of politics supplanted by an open-ended (and often religiously fundamentalist) moral framing. Humanitarianism played its part, as a growing aid industry provided the infrastructure.
The early warning shots fired by practitioners gave way to a cavalry of critical humanitarian studies scholars, who reckoned with the ethics of the humanitarian paradox, the mediatic mobilization of shame, the violence of care, the scope of humanitarian reason, the moral logic of the grievable life, the end of a narrative of a liberal and secular order of human rights, and the question—and spatial politics—of Palestine.8 Yet, violence to land, bodies, and societies affected people who still remained in the abstract: communities composed mostly of women, Muslims, Africans, people gendered and racialized, formerly or continuously colonized people, whose capacity to retain critical connection to heritage, a sense of belonging, and longstanding built environments occurred only through profound placemaking under duress. Addressing ethical and intellectual quandaries that neither the aid workers nor the scholars of previous generations had adequately acknowledged, a new generation of research by multilingual scholars, themselves refugees or working intimately with people in conditions of forced displacement, made it possible to conceive a pedagogy of possibility.
Life Beyond Emergency examines constructed environments and spatial practices in contexts of displacement, within the connected histories of colonialism and humanitarianism. People migrating under duress, seeking refuge, practicing mutual aid, and sheltering in governmental or nongovernmental settings invest in the built environment as a holder of knowledge, critical heritage, and imaginaries of life beyond emergency. The course considers the politics and poetics of architectures and infrastructures of partitions, borders, and camps: territories and domesticities of concern to authorities and inhabited by people forging solidarities and futures as an ordinary matter. It investigates the connected histories and theories of humanitarianism and colonialism, which have not only shaped lives as people inhabit spaces of emergency, but produced rationales for the construction of landscapes and domesticities of refuge, enacted spatial violence and territorial contestations, and structured architectural knowledge. Through iconic forms such as refugee camps and colonial institutions such as archives, from Somalia to Palestine to Bangladesh and beyond, inquiry into contested territories where people have been forced to migrate invites students to interrogate the normalized discourses and spaces, for example, of “borderlands” or “refugees,” in order to imagine and analyze emergency environments as constructions that people have resisted, endured, transcended, theorized, and inhabited.
Inhabiting Displacement
Sayuri Govender
The displacement of residents of District Six in Cape Town, South Africa, asks us to think about what it means to inhabit displacement.9 The ways the sudden destruction of a neighborhood in 1966 is remembered today, and whose stories are left out of this contemporary retelling, have been part of an aesthetic formalization of residents’ shared identity through the establishment of the District Six Museum. This heritage museum chronicles the lives and memories of District Six residents, and the effects of apartheid then and now.10
Displacement as a site of inhabitation and memory draws on how a settler colonial system, such as apartheid South Africa, uses architecture and spatial practices to produce a displaced population across time. The displacement of District Six residents was legislated by the Afrikaans-led apartheid government through the Group Areas Act, a series of legislations that systemically pushed African, “Coloured,” and Indian residents from their homes into designated segregated towns and townships. The architectural role of inhabitation is thus extended to the inhabitation of a lack of space, and the recreation of identity in relation to that loss.
District Six residents have been united by the intense displacement they experienced as well as the memorialization of what existed and thrived before the bulldozers came in. Their shared trauma of mass displacement and the destruction of their homes to create new land and houses for white South Africans has led to the creation of identity and community based on land restitution advocacy. Yet, the creation of a “standardized” identity narrative for District Six residents has risked leaving out certain voices in order to maintain the romantic ideal of the “multicultural” pre-apartheid District Six. District Six is often remembered by heritage centers and in writings as a multicultural neighborhood that welcomed residents of all races and exemplified the “rainbow nation” of South Africa long before the fall of apartheid. Yet, autobiographies of Indigenous Black residents of District Six reveal that Black residents experienced systematic exclusion and displacement years before their “Coloured,” Indian, and Malay counterparts did.
Romola Sanyal’s discussion of the “aestheticization of the camp,” especially her argument about “demarcated space of a particular kind of suffering, [which] acts as a form of social responsibility for these specific stakeholders,” can be extended to think about the forcible relocation of District Six residents “narrating a unique kind of suffering and displacement that is different from others.”11 While District Six removals are often narrated in terms of the devastation that occurred in 1966 as a result of the Group Areas Act, other groups had already been pushed out of the region long before this climactic moment. Black residents in District Six had been relegated to the sidelines of a mixed community, reflecting the larger anti-Black rhetoric and legislation of the apartheid regime and how it seeped into communities.
The narrative of District Six residents’ having a “unique kind of suffering” diminishes not only the experiences of those displaced in 1966, but also those of other South Africans.12 Histories of displacement are multiplied as identity is intertwined with displacement. What is the role of the inhabitant in the act of displacement? That question imagines a new form of architecture, one strongly connected to all inhabitants.
Partitions
Elia Min
Partitions inflict violence through their irony and (im)permanence. Their abstract legal frameworks continuously and intentionally create statelessness, displacement, and migration. Ultimately, partitions formed the groundwork for a modern world order, where nation-states could enclose “ethnically purified” populations under imperial sponsorship.13 But within attempts to draw clean lines emerged the liminal, in-between, and unsettled existences that were just as purposeful.
Geopolitical partitions are largely understood through the process of decolonization and consequent production of ethno-religious states. They emerged as British colonial “solutions” that institutionalized imperial privilege in the twentieth century.14 The partitions of Ireland (1921), India (1947), and Palestine (1947) drive this discourse, where sanctioned forms of difference run along ethnic and religious lines. Korea (1945) narrates a distinct instance of partitioning, one meant to sow ideological difference.15
Wedged between the forces of Japanese colonial rule and the imperialism of the United States, Korea’s land and people served as a proxy war-ground for the global ideological battle between communism and capitalism. In 1945, two American colonels demarcated the thirty-eighth parallel overnight using a National Geographic map. With a North backed by the Soviet Union and a South by the United States, military occupations saturated each half of this territorial division with a symbolic charge and a sense of irreconcilable difference. What was originally an ad hoc plan—with no Korean involvement—became a devastating fracture within the peninsula’s history.
Many Korean refugees (pinanmin) fled before freely crossing the partition became illegal. Others remained in place to protect their homes and livelihoods, having no reason or ability to leave. After all, as with other historical partitions, this division was only to be temporary. As it happened, the social identities prescribed to Koreans were adopted through a messy process of accidents and personal circumstances. This “mess” entailed the collapse of Japanese rule in 1945, major political reconfigurations, and a partition that was slowly hardening into a border.
Partition inflicts a statelessness that emerges from the social categories assigned to each nation-state. Since the seventh century, Korea had been unified under multiple dynasties, developing a reputation for ethnic and linguistic homogeneity. Statelessness—a condition of living out-of-place or in-between—thus emerged alongside a feeling of loss and detachment. The United States and Soviet Union took value in defining territory and social categories by political ideology. But at the core of these symbolic assignments are unsettled constructions and experiences of Korean unity.
The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) materializes the irony of Korea’s political and lived condition. Despite its name, the DMZ is one of the most militarized borders in the world—heavily fortified with over a million active mines. It stretches across the thirty-eighth parallel and separates two nation-states into worlds divided. But just within its borders, at four kilometers wide and 250 kilometers long, the DMZ is also … quiet.
Left untouched for over seventy years, it “connects two Koreas into one ecosystem,” housing about 6,000 wildlife species (many of which are unidentified due to mines), including 100 endangered species.16 The absence of human settlement allows wildlife to thrive across wetlands, forests, mountains, and plains. In a sense, the DMZ’s joint conservation offers a humbling, yet enabling lesson, opening space for further reconciliation.17 It reminds us that borders can be bridges, too.
As a marker of festering tensions and polar differences, the thirty-eighth parallel echoes the devastation of colonialism, military occupation, and war. The land carries symbolic attachments that vary, transform, and run deep—much like the ecosystem it houses. The DMZ teaches us that the production of ideological states through partition carved its own irony and instability into our modern world order.
Borders
Maya Sheppard
Linguistic uniformity invalidates cultural diversity, as national languages are used in the governmental education system and colloquially among people. The French language spread with fervor through colonized Algeria, further eroding borders that had already been violated through occupation. As modes of communication formerly used in the country were delegitimized, the agency of Algerian people to challenge or even effectively protest their occupation became more limited.18 Imposing a colonial order involves erasing culture, often through its vital medium, language. Yet, language is often the only thing to survive acts of violence, restriction, and political repression.
In post-independence Algeria, French colonialism posed a challenge of ownership that transcended physical borders. Algerians faced a redefinition of cultural and political identity, a continuation of a fight they had undertaken against French incursion for over a century.19 Their modes of resistance were often language based, whether through story-telling, music, or scriptures. La Langue de Zahra (2011), a documentary directed and filmed by Fatima Sissani, compiled interviews with family members in Sissani’s native language, Kabyle (with subtitles in French). Sissani’s main subject, her mother Zahra, refused to learn the French language, even after moving to France and raising her children in a francophone space.20 Her argument was clear: she would not let the colonizer win. Kabyle was the language her family had spoken for generations, the language she used to sing to her children, and one of the languages the French attempted to destroy in their occupation of Algeria. During the documentary, Mrs. Sissani tells her daughter that staying in France was like being buried alive; the resistance she displayed was her way of surviving.
Through individual acts of colonial resistance, new cultures of communication have been and continue to be formed. La Langue de Zahra is an example of anticolonialism at an individual scale; Zahra Sissani rejects French assimilation not necessarily because it will be the catalyst of an anticolonial movement, but because it means something for her to honor her culture and prevent its erasure. I imagine a future where language and culture bleed freely between borders, where supremacist agendas do not dictate the political landscape, where individuals are dedicated to embodying their cultures and engaging with others. I am inspired by Zahra Sissani not because her way of living is rebellious or anti-French, but because of the pride she has for her home.
Humanitarian Iconography
Zoë Perlis
At a Tanzanian orphanage outside of Dar es Salaam, a group of girls from an elite New England boarding school mix cement and lay bricks alongside Tanzanian workmen. They are building a library together. The girls are confident that they are the right people for the job and can complete the structure in six days, before their safari. However, unbeknownst to them, the workmen have been taking down the rows of bricks they had laid prior and re-laying them to ensure a level wall.21 This is a story that Pippa Biddle recounts in her book Ours to Explore (2021) which provides an in-depth analysis of volunteer tourism, or “voluntourism.” Biddle defines voluntourism as “any combination of unskilled volunteer work, or skilled volunteer work … done by someone unqualified and traveling on a short-term basis.”22 While Biddle was once a voluntourist herself, her book investigates the harmful effects of this practice and calls for a more ethical and intentional path forward. Her experience in Tanzania provides an image and a story—a humanitarian iconography and narrative—that reinforce ideas about Western saviorism.
In his exploration of the intersection of architecture with humanitarian aid, crisis, and compassion, Mahmoud Keshavarz cites the involvement of private firms in designing solutions for the refugee crisis. He first references a problem in the language of crisis and solution, as if the condition of displacement is one that must be addressed with a universal mechanism.23 He provides an example of an Italian architectural firm that proposed a line of lifesaving buoys to be installed in the Mediterranean Sea in response to the tragic deaths of migrants in 2013. However, the firm disregarded the Italian coast guard ignoring migrant cries for rescue. Ultimately, the firm responded to the immediacy of crisis rather than structural negligence.
Biddle and Keshavarz together address humanitarian narrative at the scale of the individual or private, as well as the social and structural. Biddle’s lived experience was of individual students and a school group who convinced themselves they could help build a library. How hard could it be, for a group of well-off and well-educated high schoolers? However, the intervention of a globalized travel-based educational program was accompanied by construction done on the ground by skilled workmen within a local economy. Keshavarz turns our attention to private architecture firms designing a product at the level of representation. However, it does not address the structural roots of a problem. It sees the image of architecture without the context of the state.
These positions show that humanitarian iconography, and critical humanitarian narratives, serve a purpose. They have the capacity to dismantle existing systems of exclusion and ignorance. Taking that seriously is an intentional path forward.
Emergency Timespace
Susana Crane Ruge
An emergency taints the space it holds. Its moral and emotional condition—that of fear, instability, and placelessness—is bordered, induced, and manipulates a sense of home. My generational emergency as a Colombian is influenced by Spanish colonialism, civil war, United States imperialism, and drug warfare. As my country flows in and out of a declared state of emergency, the reality is that emergency feels more like a timespace of containment and displacement.
The concept of emergency timespace speaks to Jon May and Nigel Thrift’s definition of “timespace,” in which the spatial aspect of time is constitutive to its experience.24 Instead of space being an added component in how people socially experience time, space is texturally embedded into time itself. An emergency timespace, then, expands the term toward the destabilization that an emergency brings. Colombia’s emergency timespace plays a particular role. It intensifies distrust and fear, and stretches the argument for violent warfare.
In Colombia, drug warfare, paramilitaries, and narcopolitics have held the country in a sixty-year chokehold. The civil war transformed into a permanent state of insecurity, permeating preconceptions and militarizations of public space. It drove entire communities from rural to urban homes, or informal neighborhoods at urban peripheries, and produced deep distrust between the country’s many mountainous regions. These fractures in how we Colombians navigate timespace across our geography are imposed by a culture of militarizing, guarding, and excluding others from space. An insecure past, one where paramilitaries forcefully recruited people, has become the imagination of the future.25 Gates surrounding communities drive fear even deeper into the future, extending emergency timespace through architecture. Through a militarized architecture pervading the country, Colombia’s temporality elongates into a never-ending emergency precisely because of the way it expresses collective memory and grief. A fearful reaction to the past continues a fearful future.
All is not lost, of course, even if the 2026 election made it seem so. The election split the country in half (by less than one percentage point), reflecting two responses to an emergency timespace. One half recognizes humanity and belonging to Colombian land; it supports a unifying mentality where past grief and conflict allow Colombians to heal through what bell hooks calls “a love ethic.”26 The other half doubled down on gates and borders, finding enemies to accuse of being responsible for a generational emergency, and militarizing our land. The latter won.
Even as the country settles into an emergency timespace sixty years deep, it is crucial to look for holes between its permanent gates, to study its quotidian architectures of resistance, to dream. In such a divided political and geographical sphere, how do we struggle from emergency to collective peace? How does a palimpsest of mourning, stress, and instability serve towards care? Constructing the future as a collective sacred experience, holding trust and hope as Colombians, global southerners, global citizens, begins with seeing our emergencies as permanent only in our memory, and using its timespace as momentum, as the means to an end. That end being unison, collective care, and radical forgiveness. I am still deconstructing my mother’s, father’s, and grandparents’ traumatic emergency. But if we learn from Life Beyond Emergency, a key word is beyond. It is clear to me that the same tools that installed fear through timespace will liberate me and my land to peace.
Land as Medium / Dispossession Ecologies
Alma Avgar Shohamy
In Píntag, Ecuador, an ancestral irrigation waterway runs from multiple mountain aquifers throughout the agricultural parish. Its age is unknown, but some say the extensive water channels may have been built by Quitu ancestors before the arrival of the Incas.
The water runs beside the central paths of over seven communities and has long been a source of nourishment and sustenance for people, cows, and crops. This waterway is a force of life; elders remember drinking from the channels with their hands. In recent decades, however, the entry of municipal pipe systems and state-sponsored plumbing have led to the neglect of the acequia and the pollution of waters that emerge from the ground only several kilometers away from the fields of Píntag. Water lifeways are being hijacked by architectures and systems of development. A municipal water company based in Quito is rerouting water from aquifer sources while Indigenous communities who have tended to water systems for countless generations go without it for up to twelve hours a day. In Píntag, emergency and scarcity have been introduced through and despite the expanding plumbing. The scarcity also brings ontological violence, preventing familial, intimate relations with water.
In these times of manufactured drought, the community movement Píntag Amaru has begun cleaning the irrigation canal to restore and revitalize water sovereignty, nurturing Yaku Mama (the water mother). While experimenting with filtration and digging new paths to clean the canal, community members have also recorded oral histories and created works of theater about the history of the channels and the elders and ancestors who have tended and been raised by these waters. Carving new paths in their ancestral homeland, Píntag Amaru is reshaping resource borders and returning to ancient waters as urban development has induced thirst.
By shaping life through the land and restricting land-based living, the rhythms of colonial relations and scarcity create emergency where resources are allocated by municipalities and humanitarian agencies with primary jurisdiction over land. In Píntag, the very waterways that uphold ancestral legacy are polluted and communities are dispossessed of their water. Emergency timespace is a carceral place in which communities forge, steward, and make a “beyond.” The forces that act on and through the land turn it into the medium and agent of dispossession. The land, in turn, becomes the medium through which people enact modes of resistance and share knowledge. Water is life! Long live the voices, narrations, and traditions of community waters. Yupaichani to my dear friends at Píntag Amaru for their generosity in sharing this work.
Camps
Shivani Shedde
Can a camp as a site of sedentarization be truly disconnected from a locale of resistance, protest, and popular culture? In 2023, as the scale of genocidal intent against the world’s largest “open-air prison” appeared in sharper focus, another kind of camp multiplied across US universities.27 Students (and often faculty and university staff) demonstrated against the institutional narrative control and vehement dehumanization of Palestinians. For weeks and months these besieged encampments and liberated zones staged emergency rallies, organized sit-ins and teaching initiatives, and sometimes embarked on radical action following in the long tradition of political student protests.28 The 2009 Berkeley Wheeler Hall occupations against the University of California’s tuition hike (or even the tree-sits and farm squats that preceded and followed) gave impetus to the Occupy movement. The construction of a “shanty town” on the Green by the Dartmouth Community for Divestment protested South Africa’s policy of apartheid in the 1980s. Anti-war and anti-Vietnam protests took over Beinecke plaza at Yale in the early 1970s. Not least, in the 1960s, smaller state universities and HBCUs experienced a multitude of building takeovers and uprisings, some of which were coordinated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that bridged civil rights demands with Third World anti-colonial struggles.
By late April 2024, as Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall was rechristened Hind’s Hall, two types of camps appeared. The under-siege humanitarian camp and the heavily policed solidarity encampment became permanently connected (however fragile those connections were) across transnational space. Moreover, in Gaza, as the former urban territory consisting of multiple municipalities interspersed with refugee camps deteriorated under rubble, anti-colonial fighters and citizens projected a different future with remarkable grit. Their struggles against sanctions, blockades, and militarized assaults provided fodder for a renewed search for anti-imperial liberation both within and beyond the confines of the Strip.
How, then, does one account for the camp as commune (à la Joshua Clover), despite the technologies of the state to capture and immobilize people and the bylaws of the institution to penalize them?29 Thinking critically about humanitarianism involves recognizing that the construction and production of camp-space extends beyond the technical aspects of international aid through the inscriptions of collectivity and shared imaginaries by camp inhabitants and solidarity activists that exist alongside the multiplicities of violence unleashed towards them, even if at different levels and scales. That is not to say that those shared imaginaries are without conflict. Indeed, the camp remains a highly contested domain of knowledge and futures. Yet, it is only through a recognition of the intersecting desires and imposed divisions that a history of the camp can truly be learned, and perhaps even the future being fought for within it.
Displacement Materialities
Erin Wen
How do materialities become infrastructures for communities structured by displacement? The organization of food offers one way to attend to how communities inhabit dispossession, making visible the everyday acts and material relations that exceed the logics of enclosure. In contexts where starvation and access to food have been weaponized, the communal labor of feeding one another reveals a different politics of care grounded in the reproduction of social life.30
In the late 1960s, amid accelerating agricultural mechanization, Black land dispossession, and the state’s systematic obstruction of food and welfare access, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative emerged within the Mississippi Delta’s rapidly changing post-plantation landscape.31 Founded on forty acres and later expanding to 680, the cooperative reclaimed land as the material basis for Black self-determination, rooting liberation in a vision of food sovereignty.32 Organized around the quotidian responsibility of ensuring food on everyone’s table, the Farm enabled former sharecroppers and tenant farmers not only to feed themselves on their own terms and restore their relationship with the earth, but also to build housing and expand a robust social services program in the face of state neglect.33 The Farm materialized a counter-infrastructure of care that refused manufactured scarcity and reconfigured everyday life through collective stewardship, shared obligation, and reciprocal exchange. As Hamer once remarked, “Give us food and it will be gone tomorrow. Give us land and the tools to work it and we will feed ourselves forever.”34
In April 2024, within the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia University’s campus, what began with the efforts of a handful of students to provision food for protestors expanded into a network of mutual aid. On a makeshift tarp, students collected and redistributed resources, including food rerouted from dining halls alongside donations from community members, as well as blankets, sanitary products, and medical supplies.35
These organized and spontaneous efforts to nourish the student-led occupation transformed the South Lawn from a site of institutional control into a space of collective inhabitation, transgressing Columbia’s attempts to secure campus grounds and partition the institution within and from the wider community. Students ate together, learned together, and stood firm in their demand for Columbia’s divestment from genocidal violence, reminding the world that entering the encampment was an act of solidarity with Palestinians facing ongoing displacement wrought by the destruction of their homes, land, and food systems.36 The materialities and infrastructures of food offered practices through which students sustained political struggle, cultivated relations of care, and enacted forms of social life otherwise foreclosed by Columbia. From the Mississippi Delta to Morningside Heights, the everyday work of farming and feeding remade spaces of subjection and exclusion into sites of world-making, where possibilities for a liberated future took shape in the present.
Heritage Openings
Sabrina Theresa Stark
Within the five snail-shaped caracoles (villages) of Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatistas reclaim a heritage subjected to generations of erasure by the Mexican state. As federal teachers swarm rural communities in Chiapas, they draw Indigenous students into “dominant projects of nationalism and capitalist labor formation,” and the bilingual and bicultural programs that follow seek less to bridge cultures than to “establish the dominance of the Spanish language above all other languages in Mexico.”37 Because language is the most intimate holder of heritage, its suppression becomes the first territory of dispossession. To surrender the Indigenous languages of Chiapas, including but not limited to the Zoque, Tzeltal, Chol, Tzotzil, or Tojolabal, is to surrender the memories those languages carried.
The autonomous schools of the caracoles cultivated by the Zapatista women refuse this logic of erasure, treating heritage as a practice to be enacted. In the Selva Tzeltal region, their practice of education is aptly named Sp’ijubtesel bajtik yu’un yach’il kuxlejaltik, or “educating ourselves for our new life.”38 In various programs such as Semillita del sol (Seed of the Sun) and the Indigenous Community Education Program for Autonomous Development, instruction proceeds in the students’ own languages and through collaborative projects rather than examinations, advancing a Tzeltal epistemology “rooted in a spiral relationship for knowledge construction; at its core is the community, the origin of cognitive development.”39 Heritage, for the Zapatistas, is neither archived nor recovered but continually reconstituted through the act of learning.
This reconstitution is inscribed, too, across the walls of the caracoles. In a classroom at Oventik, the phrase “Somos iguales porque somos diferentes,” or, “we are equal because we are different,” curls around a painted butterfly, articulating an equality nurtured from difference and conceived “for everyone, not only for Indigenous people and not only for Zapatistas. And not only for children.”40 Where the state’s schooling once dissolved Indigenous culture into the fabric of colonialist governance, the Zapatistas in their caracoles make education the ground of a life beyond emergency, the medium through which a generationally displaced people reclaims and defines its own heritage.
This article formalizes collaborations between former undergraduate and graduate students, teaching assistants, and the professor of Life Beyond Emergency and Ecologies and Inhabitations of Migration, offered from 2023 to 2025 at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Visitors Nora Akawi, Heba Alnajada, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Radha D’Souza, Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, Cajetan Iheka, Serubiri Moses, and Sarover Zaidi, as well as Elizabeth Milagros Álvarez, Samaya Mansour, Zainab Najeeb, and other teaching assistants contributed to the course. We invite readers to learn more about organizations we have worked closely with: Amistad Research Center (➝), The Gaza Resilience Initiative (➝), Immigrant Defense Project (➝), International Rescue Committee (➝), Médecins Sans Frontières (➝), Movimiento Píntag Amaru (➝), Refugee Consortium of Kenya (➝), and World Central Kitchen (➝).
This essay’s sections are structured along the themes of the Life Beyond Emergency course syllabus, ➝.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2024).
Photographs by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi taken in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Life Beyond Emergency (#lifebeyondemergency, @iyersiddiqi) was hosted by Warscapes (@warscapes), Jackfruit Research and Design (@jackfruitlive), and Urban Works Agency (@UrbanWorksAgency) and the Experimental History Project at the California College of the Arts Architecture Division exhibition “Urbanism Beyond Corona” (#UrbanismBeyondCorona). See also Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Somayeh Chitchian, “To Shelter in Place for a Time Beyond,” in Making Home(s) in Displacement: Critical Reflections on a Spatial Practice, ed. Luce Beeckmans et al. (Leuven University Press, 2022), 45–59.
Siddiqi, “Land, Emergency, and Sedentarization in East Africa,” in Architecture of Migration.
An introduction to the sans-frontières movement through diverse professional practices can be found in Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998): Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Architecture Culture, Humanitarian Expertise from the Tropics to Shelter, 1953–93,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 3 (2017): 367–84. The politics and discourses behind the sans-frontières movement owe a debt to a body of activism and lectures on state racism, biopolitics, and war (published in French and translated into English); see Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani et al., trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
The proclamation of a “new world order” by US President George Herbert Walker Bush followed on the political economic collapse of the Soviet Union. It was criticized widely in newspaper op-eds and journal articles. The sound bite spread satirically in a time before the internet and its memes, sampled in rap songs and appearing on T-shirts and posters in antiwar protests.
Work by Fiona Terry, David Rieff, Thomas Keenan, Miriam Ticktin, Ilana Feldman, Didier Fassin, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, Judith Butler, Eyal Weizman, among many others, defined this turn (coalescing, in one notable venue, in the journal Humanity). This work owed a debt to the passionate politics, labors, and writings of Edward Said.
Somayeh Chitchian et al., “Architectures of an ‘Otherwise’: Inhabiting Displacement,” Ardeth 6 (2020).
Romola Sanyal, “Architectures of Displacement: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Humanitarian Shelter,” in Inhabiting Displacement: Architecture and Authorship, ed. Shahd Seethaler-Wari et al. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021), 176–89.
Christiaan Beyers, “Identity and forced displacement: Community and Colouredness in District Six,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2013), 79–103.
Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson, “Drawing the Line, Writing Beyond It: Toward a Transnational History of Partitions,” in Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism, ed. Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson (Stanford University Press, 2019), 2.
Dubnov and Robson, “Drawing the Line, Writing Beyond It,” 25.
Vietnam (1954) experienced a similar instance of partition for over twenty years, splitting along the seventeenth parallel with a North backed by the Soviet Union and a South by the United States, framed as a “solution” that marked the end of nearly seventy years of French colonization and a brief period under Japanese occupation. In 1975, North Vietnam captured Saigon and ended the war, eventually reuniting the country under a socialist government.
Kwi-Gon Kim, The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of Korea: Protection, Conservation and Restoration of a Unique Ecosystem (Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), xv.
Kim, The Demilitarized Zone, xix.
Bilel Derbal and Saida Tobbi, “Language Functions in Algeria During the French Colonial Era: A Sociolinguistic Study,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 61, no. 3 (2026): 2383–97.
Owen White, The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
Fatima Sissani, dir., La Langue de Zahra (24images, 2019).
Pippa Biddle, Ours to Explore: Privilege, Power, and the Paradox of Voluntourism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
Biddle, Ours to Explore.
Mahmoud Keshavarz, “Violent Compassions: Humanitarian Design and the Politics of Borders,” Design Issues 36, no. 4 (2020): 20–32.
Jon May and Nigel Thrift, eds., Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London; New York: Routledge, 2001).
Germán Calderón España, La Inocencia en el Sepulcro (Bogotá: Génesis Ediciones & Comunicaciones, 2010).
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York : Perennial, 2001).
Many humanitarian organizations refer to Gaza as an open air prison; see, for instance, Roald Høvring, “Gaza: The World’s Largest Open-Air Prison,” Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), April 26, 2018, ➝. For an analysis of what the term connotes, see Ilana Feldman, “Gaza as an Open-Air Prison,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), June 25, 2015, ➝.
For an account of the liberated zone in Columbia, see Lara-Nour Walton and Sophia Cordoba, “33 Hours in the ‘Liberated Zone,’” Columbia Spectator, April 25, 2024, ➝.
Joshua Clover, “‘People Struggle Where They Are’: Joshua Clover on Riots, Strikes and Communes That Are Already Here,” interview by Ronja Mälström, Turning Point, November 24, 2024, ➝.
Miriam Ticktin, “Building a Feminist Commons in the Time of COVID-19,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (October 2021).
Bobby J. Smith II, Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023); Bobby J. Smith II, “Mississippi’s War against the War on Poverty: Food Power, Hunger, and White Supremacy,” Study the South (2019), ➝.
Fannie Lou Hamer Papers (FLHP), Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA. The National Black Food & Justice Alliance defines food sovereignty as “the right and the ability to control our food, through means including but not limited to the means of production and distribution.” Their framework emphasizes that land access is central to “healing, power and ultimately our liberation.” National Black Food & Justice Alliance, ➝.
FLHP, Amistad Research Center.
FLHP, Amistad Research Center.
Surina Venkat, “Food Organizing at Columbia’s Gaza Encampment,” South Asian Avant-Garde, September 24, 2024, ➝.
Leanne Reinke, “Globalisation and Local Indigenous Education in Mexico,” International Review of Education 50, nos. 5/6 (2004): 483–96.
Sonia Comboni Salinas, “Lumaltik Nopteswanej y Enlace, Educándonos para nuestra nueva vida. La construcción de un proyecto educativo intercultural bilingüe autonómico en la Selva Lacandona del estado de Chiapas,” Casa del Tiempo 2, no. 24 (October 2009): 26–32.
Comboni Salinas, “Lumaltik Nopteswanej,” 30.
Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, “Autonomy Under Siege,” trans. Laura Carlsen, Dorset Chiapas Solidarity, first published in Spanish in La Jornada, September 19, 2004, ➝.
