LSE Festival 2019 | Borders and Walls [Audio]

Speaker(s): Dr Elena Barabantseva, Professor Bill Callahan, Xiaolu Guo | A screening and discussion of two short films by Elena Barabantseva, University of Manchester and Bill Callahan, LSE. A discussion will follow with Xiaolu Guo, an award-winning writer and filmmaker. Border People (14 min, 2018) Elena Barabantseva, University of Manchester How does the border enter and shape a family life? What does it mean to the people who cross the border for marriage? This film juxtaposes a personal story of Meihua, a Vietnamese Yao woman who married a Yao man in China, with the stories and ritual practices that the Yao elders pass on to the young generation amidst the Chinese state’s ambitious border development plans and ethnic revival strategies. Great Walls: Journeys from ideology to experience (28 min, 2019) Bill Callahan, London School of Economics and Political Science As Trump’s Wall and the Berlin Wall show, border walls are key sites of ideology: both Cold War ideology, and anti-immigrant ideology. This film uses the Great Wall of China to consider walls as sites of experience in every life. It juxtaposes archive clips of political leaders (JFK, Trump, Merkel) and ethnographic film of ordinary people to show how even US presidents feel something when they go to the Berlin Wall or the Great Wall. The film returns to the Trump Wall and the Great Wall to probe how walls can be sites of spectacular wonder in paradoxical personal experience. Dr Elena Barabantseva is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Bill Callahan is Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations, LSE. Xiaolu Guo is a novelist and film maker. Her most recent film “5 Men and a Caravaggio” premiered at the London Film Festival (2018). Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEFestival #NewWorldDisorders This event is part of the LSE Festival: New World (Dis)Orders running from Monday 25 February to Saturday 2 March 2019, with a series of events exploring how social science can tackle global problems.