PUBLICATIONS
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[2024] “Non-Durable Solutions: The Harm of Permanently Temporary Refugee Habitation” — Journal of Applied Philosophy 41(4): 612-629.
For all the talk of ‘durable solutions’ to refugee situations, durability is in many ways the quality most conspicuously absent in refugees' everyday lives and living spaces. As the world has grown progressively more inured to the practice of using provisional spaces of transit as permanent sites of residence, the displaced increasingly find themselves trapped in spaces marked by a kind of permanent temporariness. In this article, I sketch three different ways in which living for long periods of time in temporary spaces can harm inhabitants: first, I argue that non-durability in the home can undermine cognitive function; second, that it can attenuate various forms of agency; and third, that it fails to furnish a ground on which refugees can build meaningful lives and futures for themselves. I conclude by arguing that the deprivation of durable living conditions is not only harmful, but wrongful.
[2023] “The Wrong of Refugee Containment” — The Southern Journal of Philosophy
Encampment continues to be one of the dominant modes of responding to refugee situations. I suggest that we would do well to conceive of the wrongfulness of refugee camps not just in terms of their effects, but also in terms of their function. I endorse the view that camps currently function primarily to contain displaced persons and develop a novel conception of the wrong of encampment in terms of that function. Drawing on Heidegger's account of the spatiality proper to different entities, I argue that practices of containment reduce refugees to the status of objects to be, in effect, immobilized and stored away for an indeterminate amount of time.
CURRENT PROJECTS
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[In Progress] “Life in Limbo: Refugee Detention and the Environmental Conditions of Hope”
Within the recent glut of philosophical work on hope, relatively little attention has been devoted to the conditions under which hope thrives or falters. In this paper, I show how material and spatial environments can undermine individuals’ capacity to sustain determinate hopes for the future. I do so via an extended analysis of a significant case study: refugee detention spaces, and the well-documented crises of hopelessness that have festered within them in recent years. Taking seriously refugees’ claims that a central cause of widespread hopelessness is the feeling of being in limbo, I draw on recent work on the role of imagination in hoping to show how the liminality of detention frustrates inhabitants’ ability to sustain hope for external ends by obscuring imaginable pathways toward those ends. I conclude by analyzing a distinctive form of enervated hope common amongst encamped refugees that I call idle dreaming.
[In Progress] “A Politics of Trust: Arendt on the Recognitive Structure of Political Action”
In this paper, I identify and schematize an unexplored Arendtian conception of interpersonal political trust, sourced from a brief suggestion in a late interview and elaborated via her account of political action in The Human Condition. Arendt’s picture, I suggest, can help answer a persistent quandary raised by the recent philosophical literature on trust: whether — and if so, how — we can have non-evidentiary reasons to trust political co-participants we do not know. I argue that by grounding her theory of political trust in the ineluctably social and process character of political action, Arendt shows that we have reasons to trust other members of a political community in a minimal sense on the basis of their interests rather than evidence about their trustworthiness.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZING
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Prior to my current postdoc position, I was a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow at BU's Center on Forced Displacement, where I helped organize a multi-year seminar series on contemporary US and EU border externalization practices.
Until recently, I was also co-convener of the Boston Phenomenology Circle, a multi-institutional, student-run forum for work in phenomenology, where I co-organized conferences on critical phenomenology and phenomenological approaches to the emotions.
Until recently, I was also co-convener of the Boston Phenomenology Circle, a multi-institutional, student-run forum for work in phenomenology, where I co-organized conferences on critical phenomenology and phenomenological approaches to the emotions.
© 2024 by Micah Trautmann
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