The mainstream conception of migration reinforces heteronormativity and silences the experiences of queer migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and undocumented people in Europe. The emerging scholarship on queer migration has shown the central role of gender and sexuality in migration politics and border control regimes. Researchers and activists have also revealed the ways in which gender justice and sexual rights discourse have been instrumentalized to advance anti-refugee and anti-migrant sentiments in Europe. This conference aims to bring together researchers, artists, and activists to discuss how queer and feminist interventions could inform the everyday life and representation of migration, displacement, and exile from an intersectional and comparative perspective. The event is co-organized by Heinrich Böll Foundation and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The event is partly funded by the research project titled "Transforming political representation from below: The role of (post)migrant civil society organizations in Germany.” This is a three-year research project supported by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ). You can learn more about the project from our website. Panel talks with B Camminga (ICI Berlin), Omar Kasmani (FU Berlin), Razan Ghazzawi (University of Sussex), Yener Bayramoglu (Manchester Metropolitan University), Ahmed Awadalla, Firoozeh Farvardin, Sarah Scuzzarello (University of Sussex), Anna Korteweg (University of Toronto), Camille Ogoti (ORAM), Irene Kuzemko (OII Europe), and Konstantin Sherstyuk, Ceren Saner, Carlos Kong, Rüzgar Buski, Ahmad BaBa

" Navigating opression in Dance movement therapy " Workshop by Ahmad Baba - At an event organized by the Professional Association of Dance Therapists in Germany (BTD), the Society for Tanz Research (gtf) and the MSH Medical School Hamburg. In view of the serious social changes that have taken place since the last Dance Therapy Research Day in 2019, we are taking a look at the past, present and future of dance therapy with the Dance Therapy Research Day 2023. We examine body concepts and their significance for dance and therapy from a variety of perspectives and look for ways of transformation that open up healing spaces of simultaneity between what separates and what connects: Which historical self-image needs to be questioned in dance therapy? What social positionings is our dance therapy practice based on? Which interdisciplinary impulses set dance therapy in motion and orient it towards the future? The organizing team Massumeh Rasch (integrative dance therapist DGT® cand. and theater and dance scientist) Dr. Jochen Kleres (Integrative Dance Therapist DGT® cand. and Sociologist) Dr. Petra Rostock (Integrative Dance Therapist DGT® and Social Scientist)

Re-imagining Embodiment is a Dance Movement Therapy workshop centralizing Lived experiences as the core of Body manifestations. In the workshop, different body-based interventions will be used working through various topics such as shame, body image, relational empathy and notions of rest. It’s a dive into our bodies’ endless possibilities, where unlocking the stories living in them would reintroduce us to different embodied ways of being. The Workshop is open for all with no dance experience needed. Duration: 2 Hours.

In this session, various experts will look at the intersections of feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism, ableism, and classism. By sharing best-practice examples of their activism, the experts want to encourage everyone to look beyond their own field of interest. This will help create ideas that everyone can bring home and integrate into their personal, business, and activist life. Link : https://hybrid.fundamentalrightsforum.eu/agenda?day=2021-10-12T00%3A00%3A00%2B02%3A00&location_id=8137&session=c2Vzc2lvbjo5NDUzOQ%3D%3D

Regardless of their shapes, types, or abilities, everybody is, indeed, a body. However, not everyone truly inhabits their own body. The body is the source, the manifestor, and the battlefield that holds the healing we often seek externally. This workshop delves into the complex relationship between embodiment and the colonial structuring of marginalised bodies and their functions. It examines how foreignization has led racialized sexual and gender minorities to accept distorted reflections of their embodied selves. We will explore together the factors shaping our bodies, the influence of sociopolitical beliefs and norms, and ways to reimagine communal narratives through our bodies. We will look at how various forms of embodied oppression become internalised, reproduced, and narrated as complex stories within our identitiesRegardless of their shapes, types, or abilities, everybody is, indeed, a body. However, not everyone truly inhabits their own body. The body is the source, the manifestor, and the battlefield that holds the healing we often seek externally. This workshop delves into the complex relationship between embodiment and the colonial structuring of marginalised bodies and their functions. It examines how foreignization has led racialized sexual and gender minorities to accept distorted reflections of their embodied selves. We will explore together the factors shaping our bodies, the influence of sociopolitical beliefs and norms, and ways to reimagine communal narratives through our bodies. We will look at how various forms of embodied oppression become internalised, reproduced, and narrated as complex stories within our identities.

Everybody is a body, but not everybody experiences their bodies in the same way. The intersection between race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity construct our bodies and experiences that we didn’t have a choice on. The body(s), specifically of Color and Queer, are at once sites of, oppression, resistance, and resilience. So how can we experience embodiment with each other, but most importantly with ourselves? And how does collective dancing or movement emphasize our individual experience(s) in our bodies and in relation to other bodies? In these series of workshops, we will investigate body(s) from a therapeutic approach, of how we can express what our bodies hold within, from microaggressions to racism, from resistance to empowerment, so we can find our ways back to our body(s) through the movement cycles and the manifestations of our stories that we present through our body(s). The workshops will go for two hours, including an opening circle, several interventions and a closure/reflection round ending the session. You don't need to have dance experiences. These workshops are a priority for QTBIPOC individuals, and everybody else is welcome if they understand the space they are attending and their position in it. Bring your body, and have comfortable clothes on.

About the conference - A two-day pre-meeting November 7-8 for invited artists and caseworkers attending the 2023 Safe Havens Conference in Athens, Greece For the 2023 Safe Havens conference we have entered a collaboration with Hildesheim University, together inviting you for a two-day artists’ session with a limited number of invited artists, writers and case workers (around 40 participants). Deriving from the Arts Rights Justice Academy and merging with methods and principles developed through 10 years of Safe Havens meetings, currently run by SH|FT (sh-ft.org), the two-day pre-meeting is designed to support the growing, global, collective voice of artists at risk and relocated persecuted artists through collective conversations - on issues regarding care and well-being, sustainability, and eco-perspectives on the field of arts and artistic freedom. In addition we have made space for some “artistic-jam sessions” as a means of sharing artistic work in creative sessions between artists of all disciplines. Collaborating with organisations and facilitators dedicated to these issues, a central topic for the discussions will be: how do various forms of threats and pressure affect the artistic practice and legacy of artists at risk? Whether the pressure artists and writers experience comes from society, from the family, from repressive governments; or is part of other structural oppressive mechanisms, how does this manifest in the artistic practice and production? And, what are the tools and methods artists and writers use to remain inspired and constructive? What needs, resources and gaps are there in the support system and in solidarity initiatives between artists at risk?

The residencies, screenings, workshops, discussions and performances will combine the dual disciplines that Ahmad is engaged in: performing arts and dance therapy. On this spectrum Ahmad is investigating how systemic oppression is embedded in lived experiences of communities who are by default marginalised. How bodies hold notions of shattered identities, shame, and disrupted narratives that become the biographies they start to believe in about their own existence in this world. How to achieve therapeutic transformation when systems of oppression are still reproduced, even inside of mental health facilities, that most of marginalised identities have no access to? This residency is a space to exchange on these questions, centralising the immense cruciality of one’s own embodied experiences and polylithic identities that are affected by power structures and colonial narratives. To attend a cycle of a transformative awareness, the process cannot be individualistic,only, like many types of commodified western appropriated practices that pathologise non-hedonic behaviours, but rather its a relational collectivist approach that ideally understands community-based work as an act of change by itself.