Amal Treacher Kabesh Annual Lecture: On Leaving 'Omelas' – Asylum and the Social Production of Moral Indifference

ICEMiC Amal Treacher Kabesh Annual Lectures

Title: On Leaving ‘Omelas’ – Asylum and the Social Production of Moral Indifference

Abstract

This talk focuses on the social production of moral indifference towards the plight of people seeking asylum. The first part of my title comes from Ursula K. Le Guin and a short story in which a society makes a carceral contract with itself. As I’ll describe it, I think “Omelas” is an allegory through which to explore something characterising our own society that is not merely bureaucratically atomised and routine – but actively racialized.

My emphasis is on its social production – such that we might alter its re-production – not least by refusing as self-explanatory that failures in asylum governance are the outcome of people seeking it. This seemingly chronic tendency can be and is challenged, especially at local levels, sometimes spectacularly, yet the broader challenge remains. Namely, the failures in a parallel form of governance for people seeking asylum, the racialization it leverages, and the ‘crisis ordinariness’ this normalises.

Biography

Nasar Meer is Professor of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow and a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). He was previously Professor of Sociology and Director of RACE.ED at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor of Comparative Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde.

He is Chair of the Academic Committee of The Stuart Hall Foundation (SHF) and was co-Investigator of The Impacts of the Pandemic on Ethnic and Racialized Groups in the UK (UKRI, 2021-2023) and Principal Investigator of The Governance and Local Integration of Migrants and Europe's Refugees (GLIMER) (JPI ERA Net / Horizon-2020).