postmigrant perspectives on the unspoken and the unspeakable

In my doctoral thesis Postmigrant Perspectives, I draw on my own position as a third-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor as a source of knowledge and experience. In the spirit of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009), I seek to develop a dialogical understanding of the effects of forced migration resulting from the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) on the second generation in Switzerland.

Based on the assumption that experiences of loss resulting from flight and migration have cross-generational effects, I combine knowledge of the Holocaust, migration, and post-war experiences not in a competitive manner, but by mutually elucidating and productively expanding upon them.

Methodologically, my project is based on a videographic-participatory approach that combines epistemic listening — derived from the psychoanalytic practice of equal attention (Freud 1912) — with video-voice (Wang and Burris 1997) to create a space in which the unspeakable and the search for biographical traces can become visible.

By understanding migration not as a research subject but as a research perspective, my work contributes to a new understanding of postmigrant Swiss society (Espahangizi 2018) and, at the same time, makes a methodological contribution to cultural and post-migration studies, culminating in artistic realisations, as demonstrated for the first time at Theater 2.21. In doing so, I explore and reimagine spaces and bring them to life simultaneously through multimedia, ethnographic, and testimonial storytelling and reflections.

The dissertation is supervised by Prof. Dr. Christine Lötscher (University of Zurich, ISEK) and
Dr. Greg Scott (DePaul University Chicago), and is funded by Doc.CH of the Swiss National Science Foundation.