Bilgin Ayata is Professor for Southeastern European Studies at the University of Graz. Her research centers on socio-political transformation processes with a focus on migration, racism, affect and emotions, intersectional and postcolonial studies. At present she carries out three funded research projects concerning affective citizenship, the EU border regime, and authoritarian transition in the wider European context. She has published widely on migration, displacement, diasporas, citizenship, memory, mobilization. Ayata is DFG-Mercator Fellow at the SFB 1171 "Affective Societies", FU Berlin.

Spotlight Talk: Discipline and Affect - Calibrating Citizenship after Diversity

29th May 09.30 – 10.15 am | Bilgin Ayata (Graz)

Only a decade after the systematic annihilation of plurality through race laws and concentration camps in the Holocaust, Germany began to recruit workers from abroad. What was envisioned as a temporary measure for economic development should soon become a permanent feature of Germany`s “diversity trouble”. The unresolved paradox of Germany`s commitment to confront the Holocaust while denying colonialism and racism constitutes one cornerstone of this diversity trouble. Another one is citizenship reforms since legal status is no longer an easy recourse for socio-political exclusion with increasing naturalization. In contrast to Black Germans, whose existence has been ignored by official politics, the so-called “Germans with a migration background” are subjects and objects of political debates of what they need to affectively perform to count as citizens. In my talk, I will explore the affective calibration of citizenship as the disciplining of racialized subjects by juxtaposing how racialized subjects themselves contribute or contest such calibration.