On 29 October 2024, dr. Shahin Nasiri (lecturer in Philosophy at Tilburg University) will give a lecture on his PhD research on Rethinking Freedom from the Perspective of Refugees: Lived Experiences of (Un)freedom in Europe’s Border Zones.
Shahin’s dissertation (defended at the UvA on 13 September 2023) is a pioneering contribution to contemporary refugee and migration studies. But maybe even more impressively, it also sheds new light on a centuries-old philosophical debate on the nature of freedom. This a very crowded field, but Shahin manages not only to formulate a convincing, distinctly new conception of freedom, one that challenges many old dogmas, but also to do so by reconstructing the self-understanding precisely of those people who are traditionally excluded from philosophical theorizing. Refugees, the thesis emphasizes, are neither passive victims, nor unbound heroes, but political subjects who develop their own distinct normative conceptions and worldviews, and freedom is a key concept for this, alongside and interconnected with equality and friendship.
