No Borders! No Nations! No binary gender formations!
Queer feminist solidarity smashes borders!
On 14-16 June 2021, the Feminist No Borders Summer School took place online. During three days, activists, researchers, artists, and people with lived experiences of migration have been attending and sharing together different discussions, workshops and lectures. Different projects and organizations that fight against borders and work from queer feminist solidarity experiences, including the BRIDGES Project, participated on the programme.
Along those days, the Feminist No Borders Summer School has addressed the representatios of and against borders through photography, documentary fils, journalism or ethnography, reflecting about the hegemonic representations and categories of borders. In the workshop about “Deexceptionalizing Displacement/Displacement”, participants worked, through storytelling and dialogue, on shifting the frameworks and understanding of the notion of displacement because those approaches often reproduce rather than challenge the borders we want to fight against.
How to unborder the ways we think about displacement? In the session about “Struggles Against Borders” different activists explained about the context of the Mediterranean and Aegean borders and the solidarity experiences against criminalisation of people on the move. In the presentation of “Mutual Aid in the Pandemic of Borders”, the Khanapados collective kitchen in Delhi described how they mobilised artists and community members to respond to the urgent needs produced by the multiple borders intensified by the coronavirus pandemic. In the discussion of “Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants”, the author Nandita Sharma and two other no borders scholar-activists, Bridget and Nicholas, engaged in an informal discussion on the ‘Postcolonial New World Order.’ “Break Down the Walls, Close the Camps!” Parwana explained the Build Schools, Not Walls campaign and shared her work on the self-organised school at Ritsona camp in Greece.
To finalize the Summer School, the Zine Workshop helped to collectively and informally reflect on the Summer School.
