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The disappearing immigrants: hunger strike as invisible struggle

My research / practice is firmly rooted in a paradigm that recognises expression as embodied, gendered and performative. Thus much of my research interacts and engages with embodied communities, and much of the articulation of my research findings is expressed in embodied form—through performance. ‘The disappearing immigrants’—co-written with my collaborator Myrto Tsilimpounidi—is a critical reflection on the Athenian hunger strike in which 300 citizens campaigned against government initiatives and the clamp down on the economy. It sees resistance as embodied, and as having the capacity to transform spaces of domination and oppression. It theorises the aesthetics of hunger strike as a performance, and raises a timely question about the ethics and political efficacy of the hunger strike as a persuasive tool. This research also spawned a performance, ‘It’s a Beautiful Thing, the destruction of Wor(l)ds’, delivered at various conferences and relating to the Greek protests. This performance explores the concept of ‘occupying’ in resistance movements, which is performative, embodied and affective. As an alternative strategy for disseminating the personal and subjective politics of struggle, our article ‘Merry crisis-mas (from Greece)’ offers a creative photo-essay provoking reflection on the human and particularly gendered experience of the Greek protests. Through these alternative modes of dissemination we hope that our research becomes active in enabling social change and in impacting on communities beyond the academy.