On Wednesday, June 10th, Professor Miriam Ticktin, co-director of the Zolberg Institute, gave this year’s Elizabeth Colson Lecture at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre. The Colson Lecture is a prestigious annual event that the University of Oxford hosts to highlight and showcase innovative, timely and thought provoking work in the interdisciplinary field of Refugee Studies.

Professor Ticktin’s talk is entitled Innocence: Understanding a Political Concept. To tune into the full lecture please visit the event page here. Below you will find an abstract of her talk.

“With the grounding assumption that innocence plays a central role in the politics of forced migration and asylum, this lecture will delve into the idea of innocence, trying to understand it and render its workings more legible, and arguing that it is a political – not simply a religious or moral – concept. By examining the figure of the child, the trafficked victim, the migrant, asylum seeker, the enemy combatant and the animal, Professor Ticktin will suggest that innocence sets up hierarchies of humanity, all the while feeding an expanding politics of humanitarianism. Ultimately, she will ask if innocence is a concept we want to protect.”