Make a place in the World

The experience of displacement is not only about the loss of a place, and the pain and bereavement this entails. It is also, and inevitably, about the struggle to make a place in the world, a place which makes action meaningful through shared understandings and a shared interpretation of action.

To emphasise the horror and pain of the loss of ‘home’ or ‘neighbourhood’ and to say nothing – or little – about the work of producing home or neighbourhood, whether in a refugee camp, detention centre, city slum or middle class suburb, is to treat the displaced as fundamentally flawed human beings, as lacking what it takes to be social agents and historical subjects.

It is to see them - as virtually everyone who writes about refugees urges us not to see them - as a category of ‘passive victims’ who exist to be assisted, managed, regimented and controlled, and for their own good. And it makes it more difficult for us to identify with the suffering stranger, to see him or her as an ordinary person, a person like us, and therefore as a potential neighbour in our neighbourhood.

David Turton, QEH, Oxford Univ
The meaning of place in the world of movement, August 2004


Oxford

‘Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene’ (Dougill, 1998, pp. 146 and 151).

The physical manifestation of Rhodes’s attachment to Oxford is all around us ……………………thinking of Oxford, is a reminder of the power places have to call forth an emotional response in us, a power which is especially potent when skillfully and artfully linked to the ideology of nationalism.

A passage of Matthew Arnold’s eulogy to Oxford