Cultural citizenship, image-making and ‘radicalisation’

We invite you to an exciting seminar on Cultural Citizenship, Image-making and ‘Radicalisation’: a comparative overview of Somalis in Australia, Italy and the United Kingdom.

This seminar is brought to you by VU’s Centre for Cultural Diversity Wellbeing and the presenter is Dr Vivian Gerrand (University of Melbourne). It covers how cultural citizenship can contribute to the prevention of violent extremism.

While there is significant investment by Western governments in counter-terrorism measures and surveillance, relatively few resources have been allocated to understanding of the root causes of what is controversially called ‘radicalisation’.

Taking as a case study Somalis, who are among the most marginalised of Muslim minority refugee communities to have resettled in the West, Vivian adopts a comparative qualitative approach to reconceptualise ‘radicalisation’ by focusing on the cultural citizenship of Somalis in Australia, Italy and the United Kingdom. To develop vital insight into the relationship between citizenship and ‘radicalisation’, her research has explored the ways in which Somali image-making practices counter the negative representations that dominate mainstream media.

Finally and crucially, she considers how image-making practices articulate and contribute to minority belonging and cultural citizenship.

The speaker

Dr Vivian Gerrand is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Research Unit for Public Cultures, School of Culture and Communication, at the University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne on Somali belonging in Italy and Australia and was an AEUIFAI Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the European University Institute in 2015.

Her work has appeared in a number of academic publications as well as in general audience, scholarly, articles in Arena Magazine, Overland and The Conversation.

Her book, Possible Spaces of Somali Belonging, is forthcoming with Melbourne University Press in 2016.