Literary Festival 2016: Uninvited Arrivals: refugees and the challenge of responsibility [Audio]

Speaker(s): Dr Ruben Andersson, Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, Dr Myria Georgiou, Dr Pierluigi Musarò | This panel reflects upon the dramatic recent increase of deaths in the Mediterranean and discusses the pressures that these deaths are exerting upon the concept and practice of collective responsibility in Europe. Crucial to the continent's own liberal self-description, the ethics of responsibility is today suspended between European democracies' moral imperative to save the lives of vulnerable others and an economy of indifference that, through denial and inaction in the sea, allows for the deaths of certain populations to take place without sanctions or repercussions. What does responsibility become, in the light of this ethical failure? What should it have become instead? How is it possible to imagine alternative conceptions of responsibility, in the midst of these new hierarchies of life and humanity? Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist at LSE working on migration, borders and sec