Autotopographies of Forced Displacement: City Walking Tours as a Path for Political Visibility

Abstract

Though forced displacement is prominent within academic research, as well as within public, political, and media debates, all too often the image of forcibly displaced persons is that of voiceless victims and the structural causes behind their trauma are overlooked. The article works to disrupt this problematic visualization through an original study of walking tours offered by refugees and internally displaced persons in Berlin and Jaffa. It utilizes walking as the method and theme of research, mapping the potential of walking as a collaborative pedagogy and a subaltern design tactic to claim political participation and belonging in the city. Through this, the article offers a new analytical perspective concerning the agency of discalced persons to navigate the politics of their (im)mobility and (in)visibility. The main argument is that these guided tours or ‘autotopographies’ of forced displacement hold the political capacity to alter the public visibility of displaced people, but also to illuminate aspects that are overlooked or erased within the city’s official display of memory. The article therefore advances debates about the politics of urban space and heritage sites and contributes to research which seeks to theorize the multiple geo-temporal colonial entanglement of forced displacement regimes.