11/09/2026 @ 5:30 PM

Peterson Hall 108

A talk by Tom Western

Part of McGill's Anthropology Speaker Series

Co-Presented by McGill Refugee Research Group

Description:

Racial and spatial violence is everywhere in Athens. Rooted in colonialities that invent the city as the source of Europeanness, Athens is forever being whitewashed—historically and geographically, literally and figuratively. An example: in 2022, the then Minister of Migration and Asylum, Notis Mitarakis, posed for cameras in a refugee camp just outside the city center. Announcing the camp’s closure—with the removal of residents to closed facilities far from the city—he stated that he was “returning the space to the Athenians”. A border drawn. The word “Athenians” becomes coded along ethnonational lines, conflating the city, its histories and urban spaces, with monocultural formations of ethnicity, language, and identity. Everyone else is made disposable and dispossessable.

Scenes like this proliferate, and the removal of marginalized populations has been both policy and street-level violence all the way back. Yet there are other ways of telling the city—breaking open notions of Athenianness through affirmative geographies that are just as old, subtly subverting the politics of unbelonging in the city. This paper builds a counter-archive (a counter-Athens) of city narrations: the work of a youth organization for whom Athens is also Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, and more; an “Anticolonial Conference of the Mediterranean” held in Athens in 1957; the dreams of Ottoman travel writers who remake the city as a play of associations, communing across continents and centuries; the spatial resistance strategies of unsanctioned communities who become the city despite everything. In all cases, the paper develops what I’m calling insistent relations, drawing strength from movement histories, and pushing them into collective futures. And in so doing, the paper seeks what Edward Said wrote of as “communities of method” to build a politics beyond marginalization and dispossession. In which colonial typologies are done away with. In which other geographies are created entirely.

Bio:

Tom Western is an Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Geography, based at University College London. His work centers on creativity and community: how people find ways of being together beyond the violence of borders, ethnonationalisms, and empire; how we can remake histories and geographies in the process. For the last decade Tom has been doing this mostly in contexts of the Mediterranean—particularly in Athens, Greece—where he’s involved in various forms of collaborative research, community organizing, and movement building. He has recently published work in the journals Social Text, Society and Space, The Journal of Creative Geography, and Migration and Society. His first book, titled Circular Movements, is almost done. Tom regularly produces spatial art-research pieces—gathered together on his website undercartographies.city—that offer illuminations of Athenian histories, geographies, movements and relations.