Cartographies of Justice
Creative Event
Saturday, 8th December 2012
1pm – 7pm
Cartographies of Justice creative event was curated and organized by Dr Lena Simic, Dr Gary Anderson and Ms Carmel Cleary from the Department of Drama, Dance and Performance Studies and was generously funded from the Vice Chancellor’s Innovation Fund.
Cartographies of Justice was a creative investigation into citizenship, migration and belonging with an eye on social and ecological justice. This event brought together internationally renowned art activists, writers, poets and performance practitioners (in feminist alphabetical order) Jennifer Verson, Katherina Radeva, Natasha Davis and Sai Murray with Liverpool-based artists and members of the migrant community (Migrant Artists Mutual Aid and Merseyside Refugee and Asylum Seekers Pre and Post Natal Group). This was about the local meeting the transnational in order to help create supportive and inclusive networks for all involved.
Levinas says somewhere that the definition of justice – which is very minimal but which I love, which I think is really rigorous – is that justice is the relation to the other. That is all.
Jacques Derrida
The event took on Emmanuel Levinas’s figuration of justice as the relation to the other, and with that in mind posed questions around our own individual, reflexive migrant positions, cultural perceptions of immigrants in the UK and immigration law and rules as set out by the UK Border Agency.
In reality, justice does not include me in the equilibrium of its universality; justice summons me up to go beyond the straight line of justice, and henceforth nothing can mark the end of this march; behind the straight line of the law the land of goodness extends infinite and unexplored, necessitating all the resources of a singular presence. I am therefore necessary for justice, as responsible beyond every limit fixed by an objective law. The I is a privilege and an election. The sole possibility in being of going beyond the straight line of the law, that is, of finding a place lying beyond the universal, is to be I.
Emmanuel Levinas
The Programme of the event was as follows: Student Performance, Migrant Story Slam, Invited Artist Talks, Long Table Discussion, Migrant Feast
download the brochure here: Cartographies of Justice final
Pa Modou Bojang interviews Dr Lena Simic
Cartographies Of Justice 