CRASSH hosts: Rethinking exile—on fractured lives and the capacity of beginning anew

How do we think, create, and act when the trajectories of life and knowledge are disrupted by war, exile, precarity, or the crises of the contemporary world? ‘Rethinking Exile brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners to explore exile as both a lived condition and a metaphor for the fractures shaping modern intellectual and political life. 

The symposium examines how displacement – whether through conflict, authoritarianism, economic recession, or broader societal upheavals – interrupts the pursuit of knowledge, and existential or intellectual trajectories. These fractured trajectories unsettle institutions and reconfigure publics, raising urgent questions about how knowledge is created, mobilised, and valued. 

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality and Edward Said’s reflections on intellectual exile, the event invites participants to interrogate whether these frameworks remain adequate in a world shaped by post-truth politics, digital disruption, and shifting geopolitical imaginaries. Through interdisciplinary panels, creative provocations, and a participatory discussion, the symposium explores how fractured lives may generate new forms of knowledge, new publics, and new beginnings.

Convenors

• Zeina Al Azmeh (Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge)
• Patrick Baert (Department of Sociology; Selwyn College, University of Cambridge)
• Jo-Anne Dillabough (Faculty of Education; Hannah Arendt Consortium, University of Cambridge)
• Frisbee Sheffield (Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge)
• Lauren Wilcox (Centre for Gender Studies, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge)

While religion is not an explicit theme at this event, topics include histories of German‑Jewish thought, contemporary refugee experience, and the afterlives of colonial and imperial violence. Exilic traditions, questions of statelessness, and contested ideas of homeland, return and belonging surface repeatedly, alongside reflections shaped by Islamic, Christian and post‑colonial contexts—from Sudan and Syria to South Africa and Israel–Palestine. Contributors examine how religious imaginaries, ethical commitments and spiritual vocabularies inform experiences of temporariness, fear, hope and endurance in conditions where legal and political recognition repeatedly fail.

Artistic and literary contributions punctuate the afternoon, including film, poetry, prose and participatory performance, offering aesthetic practices as sites of memory, testimony and world‑making. Themes of natality, renewal and creation resonate throughout, echoing theological questions about beginning again in unsettled times: what sustains collective life when sovereignty fractures, institutions collapse, or faith in linear progress is abandoned?

This event invites critical reflection on exile as a lived, ethical and imaginative practice—one that traverses religion, politics and art, and insists on the fragile yet enduring capacity to begin anew.

Visit the CRASSH website for full details and to register.