Philanthropy or solidarity? Ethical dilemmas about humanitarianism in crisis afflicted Greece

That philanthropy perpetuates the conditions that cause inequality is an old argument shared by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde and Slavoj Zizek. I recorded the same argument in conversations regarding a growing humanitarian concern in austerity-ridden Greece. At the local level a number of solidarity initiatives provide the most impoverished families with humanitarian help. Some citizens participate in such initiatives wholeheartedly, while some other citizens criticize solidarity movements drawing primarily from Marxist-inspired arguments, such as, for example, that humanitarianism rationalises state inaction. The local narratives presented in this article bring forward two parallel possibilities engendered by the humanitarian face of social solidarity: first, its empowering potential (where solidarity initiatives enhance local social awareness), and second, the de-politicisation of the crisis and the experience of suffering (a liability that stems from the effectiveness of humanitarianism in ameliorating only temporarily the superficial consequences of the crisis). These two overlapping possibilities can help us problematise the contextual specificity and strategic employment of humanitarian solidarity in times of austerity

Projecting places: Personal photographs, migration and the technology of (re)location

[No abstract available

(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe. © The Author(s) 2018

Witnessing to survive: Selfie videos, live mobile witnessing and black necropolitics

[No abstract available

'Money of kurbet is money of blood': the making of a 'hero' of migration at the Greek-Albanian border

A young Albanian who hijacked a Greek public bus in May 1999 has been apotheosised as a 'hero of migration' by fellow-Albanians. This paper considers how the hijacker's story, as narrated in a pirated cassette-recorded memorial song, has served as a collective document of everyday exploitation and violation at the hands of Greek bosses and the police, as well as a vehicle for fantasising revenge and recouping agency, voice and masculinity. The moral claims and gender ideologies asserted in this alternative account of the hijacking are grounded in a discourse of kurbet (a Turkish-derived term for 'travel-for-work') and its distinctive constructions of subjectivity, history and value. While this event reified the Greek-Albanian border, giving credence to the notion that Greeks and Albanians exist in different developmental and civilisational time-zones, the deaths of the Albanian hijacker and a Greek hostage, both men in their twenties, and the public mourning of their fathers, point to a shared crisis of social reproduction, national health and male power in the context of post-socialism and the global economy

(Re)sounding histories: On the temporalities of the media event

This article argues that the media event constitutes a critical mode for experiencing temporality in contemporary society. A perceptual and topological approach is presented centering on the event’s transitivity as it unfolds across event-spaces, media formats, and national media envelopes. My case is the unprecedented ‘live’ televisual coverage of the 1999 hijacking of a Greek bus by an Albanian migrant worker, whose death was publicly mourned in a widely circulated cassette-recorded Albanian memorial song. Focusing on the hijacker’s act of ‘speaking back’ to Greek bosses and police, I link the re-enactments and affective (re)sounding of this contested media event to the violent unsettling and reconfiguration of national borders, ideological discourses, social networks, and labor regimes that occurred after the collapse of European communism and prior to the establishment of the neo-liberal Eurozone. © Berghahn Books

Memeifying the corpse: The photograph and the dead body between evidence and bereavement

[No abstract available

Witnessing in the age of the database: Viral memorials, affective publics, and the assemblage of mourning

Many terms, such as spontaneous shrines, grassroots memorials and performative commemoratives, have been used to describe the collaborative on-site and online memorials created following the deaths of national and global figures, as well as those of unknown victims of mass-mediated disasters. I argue that the adjective “viral” better captures the temporality, spatiality, materiality, and mimeticism of these formations, as well as their frequent pathologization. Contemporary performative public mourning follows from mediated witnessing in the era of networked digital media, forming a witnessing/mourning assemblage. The corporeal testifying of the witness-turned-mourner contributes material derivatives to an affective network. Breaking from constative, narrative testimony and the exclusionary logic of the monument, these memorial aggregations emerge from processes of database (de)composition and network virality. Through the close analysis of a 2008 YouTube memorial video tribute for victims of a Greek bus accident, I consider shifts in public grieving and memorialization of catastrophic media events in relation to developments in web protocols and platforms. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016