If the Body Politic Could Breathe in the Age of the Refugee

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XI

   PDF

2. Prologue

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 1-3

3. Introduction to the Research Process

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 5-25

4. The Borders of Belonging: Mapping the Moment

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 27-38

5. The Question of Roots: Tracing a History of Thought

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 39-52

6. The Politics of Shaping Home

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 53-62

7. The Body Politic

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 63-82

8. An Emergent Ethic: Sensing Response-ability

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 83-90

9. A Practice of Paradox: Breathing Life into Theory

   • Julia Metzger-Traber

   Pages 91-106

10. Autopoeisis: Co-creating Home in Berlin

    • Julia Metzger-Traber

    Pages 107-128

11. (In)conclusions: Leaping into the Abyss

    • Julia Metzger-Traber

    Pages 129-131

12. Back Matter

    Pages 133-141

    PDF

This book posits that the ‘refugee crisis’ may actually be a crisis of identity in a rapidly changing world. It argues that Western conceptions of the individual ‘Self’ shape metaphors of political homes, and thus the geopolitics of belonging and exclusion. Metzger-Traber creatively re-conceives political belonging by perceiving the interconnection of each ‘Self’ through its most immediate home – the breathing body. On an experimental literary journey through her own past and that of Germany, she puts political philosophy in conversation with somatic and spiritual insight to expand notions of ‘Self’ and 'Home'. Then she asks: What ethical imperatives arise? What kinds of homes and homelands would we create if we no longer thought we ended at our skin?

• peace studies
• somatics
• transrational peace philosophy
• elicitive conflict transformation
• ethics
• border studies
• refugee crisis
• politics of touch
• trauma healing
• expressive arts therapy
• interbeing
• hospitality
• postmodern
• political belonging
• engaged Buddhism

• UNESCO Chair and MA Program for Peace Studies, University of Innsbruck, Igls-Vill, Austria

  Julia Metzger-Traber

Julia Metzger-Traber is a peace researcher from the MA program in Peace, Development, Security and International Conflict Transformation at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is engaged in facilitating collaborative public art projects and community restorative justice processes as peace work.

Policies and ethics