Research seminar information
Time: Friday, 19.9.2025, 13:00-14:00 (UTC +3 / Helsinki time)
Place: Room 247 (2nd floor), Unioninkatu 33 (inner courtyard), you can also join in by Zoom, Passcode: 791038
Why Phenomenology of Migration Today? Rethinking Ethics and Political Aesthetics of Migration Beyond Threat and Innocence
Planetary migration no doubt belongs to the phenomena shaping our world today. As such, it provokes questions of public and academic significance. Among all disciplines concerned with migration, philosophy with its methodological richness could and should contribute to this field in a scholarly broad way. For now, the philosophical effort in the study of migration channels primarily in migration ethics. Without discrediting this approach and its pragmatically political relevance, I note that it operates with a narrow notion of migration and frames the problems it poses mostly in a mode of normative administration. This perhaps being a vice of analytic philosophy, I propose that phenomenological study of migration, now existing punctually and rather as an undercurrent of both philosophical and phenomenological research, can add much to a better understanding of the migration experiences, the whoness of migrants, or to the complex relationality of the phenomenon itself. In this talk I choose to discuss the dimensions of political aesthetics of migration in the Western world in terms of the mutual relation between social imagining and its media representation referring to two such imaginaries: migrants as a threat and migrants as innocent victims. How could phenomenological inquiries of migration enrich this realm of imaginative political reflection?
About the speaker
Maria Robaszkiewicz is a postdoc at Paderborn University, Germany, from where she also received her PhD (2015), discussing Hannah Arendt’s concept of exercises in political thinking. In 2022/2023 she was a visiting professor at the Centre for the Studies of Theory and Criticism and a Visiting Fellow at King’s College, Western University, London ON, Canada. She is a member of the editorial board of the online journal HannahArendt.net, and an affiliated researcher at the Center for History of Woman Philosophers and Scientists. Recently, she published the book Hannah Arendt and Politics. A Critical Introduction, together with Michael Weinman (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).