https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:02 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/vicissitudes-of-emotions-and-political-action-during-the-greek-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:02 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/vicissitudes-of-emotions-and-political-action-during-the-greek-crisis/ Continued]]> Action readiness is considered a central property of emotions in most psychological theories. Emotions are the engine of behavior. They are the motivating, directing, prioritizing function of the brain, and impel to an immediate reaction to challenges and opportunities faced by the organism. Nevertheless, under sociopolitical malaise, emotions do not always lead to action. People leave in societies characterized by particular emotional cultures, climates, and atmospheres that set the background to what emotions are felt under which circumstances. The impact of an emotion depends on how relevant, that is, emotionally significant is the event for the individual; on the implications of the event for the person’s well-being and immediate or long-term goals; on the individual’s capacity to cope with or adjust to the consequences of the event; and on the significance of the event with respect to individual and collective self-concept and to social norms and values. Although emotions trigger action, events with high emotional intensity may mobilize defense mechanisms that distort facts, so that the event may appear distant or not concerning the individual personally. In such cases action is hindered because the meaning of the emotive event, although fully intellectually understood, does not have personal emotional reality. If the defense mechanisms prove inefficient or collapse, the event may be experienced as traumatic, that is, as a shocking occurrence that brings about a rupture in the continuity of existence, numbing of senses and mental faculties, and inability to think about what happened for periods that may last from days to years, although individuals and collectives may appear quite normal in carrying out everyday routines. Interpretative “emotion work” in formal or informal contexts may change emotions from immobilizing to mobilizing, or from destructive to constructive, as the traumatic event is being “worked through” and a cohesive narrative about it develops. But even then, action and in our case, political action, depends on the individual’s available repertoire—political efficacy and resilience—built up from past recoveries and a sense of support from social networks, and hope in assessing the costs and benefits from the harms brought by acting and the harms brought by non-acting.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-mediatized-border-technologies-and-affects-of-migrant-reception-in-the-greek-and-italian-borders/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:47 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-mediatized-border-technologies-and-affects-of-migrant-reception-in-the-greek-and-italian-borders/ Continued]]> In line with the European self-description of its borders as a space of “humanitarian securitization,” this article approaches the border as a network of mediations around migrants and refugees, where emotions of fear and empathy co-exist through digital connectivities—what we call the “mediatized border.” Drawing on media, security, and gender studies, we demonstrate how such techno-affective networks are constitutive of (rather than simply complementary to) the border as a hybrid site of both military protection and care for the vulnerable. We do this through hermeneutic and participatory engagements with the two main border sites of the 2015 migration “crisis,” Italy and Greece, and discuss their implications on our understanding of the power relationships of human mobility.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/migrating-motherhood-and-gendering-exile-eastern-european-women-narrate-migrancy-and-homing/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:32 +0000 http://arc.local/items/migrating-motherhood-and-gendering-exile-eastern-european-women-narrate-migrancy-and-homing/ Continued]]> This article draws on a larger oral history project with Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Polish migrant women living Greece, exploring how migrancy, motherhood and mothering intersect with how a negotiation and translation of emotional, cultural, embodied agency is transformed in the meanings of citizenship on translocal and transnational levels. We unpack gendered representations of how striving to belong is transmitted in migrant mothering practices and how the latter intersect with wider issues of immigration policy and status in an era of crises in Greece. In mapping experiences of migrant mothering through participant narratives, we demonstrate the importance of understanding mothering and migrancy as parallel, complementary and complex performativities. As such they form iconographies of resilience, incorporation and individual agency as women cope with being both migrants and mothers, often without extensive networks of support, and within a context of a wider xenophobic and crisis-ridden Greece.

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