Getting Close to Other Others: Doing Difference Differently Nilmini Fernando Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Australia ABSTRACT This essay expands on my uses of the central concept of Sara Ahmed’s seminal work, Postcolonial Encounters, in a participatory theater-based research project with a cohort of women from different countries in West Africa ‘On their Way’ through the asylum/migration nexus in the Republic of Ireland. I situate asylum- seeking (and asylum-giving) in white nations as a fourth encounter between the West and the rest, and examine the shifting conditions in which encounters between the other, and ‘other others’ take place. Part 1 of the paper provides a background to my research project and asylum-seeking in the Irish context. In Part 2, I outline my use of the ‘encounters’ method to make decolonial interventions across theory, epistemology and methodology. Part Three analyses a devised theatrical scene to illustrate how the women re-stage the past and present, disrupt relations of power, proximity and distance, and speak back to what has been said or known about them. I conclude with a discussion of ‘making theory from the flesh’ to distinguish specific forms of Black female agency and resistance and outline my current practice-based applications of Ahmed’s work in Australia. KEYWORDS Postcolonial asylum; asylum; participatory drama; decolonial feminist praxis; postcolonial encounters; theory in the flesh A politics of encountering gets closer in order to allow the differences between us, as differ- ences that involve power and antagonism, to make a difference to the very encounter itself. The differences between us necessitates the dialogue, rather than disallow it. […] It is the work that needs to be done to get closer to others in a way that does not appropriate their labour as ‘my labour’, or their take their talk as ‘my talk’ that makes possible a different form of collective politics. (Sara Ahmed 2000: 180) My encounter with Sara Ahmed’s body of philosophical work in Black and Postcolonial feminism was ignited during my doctoral research undertaken through the Woman Studies program at University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland. It has since formed a bloodline that has nourished all my scholarly and activist work and remains integral to my feminist life and praxis. In this essay, I expand on my uses of the central concept of Ahmed’s(1999) seminal work, Postcolonial encounters, in a partici- patory theater-based research project with a cohort of African 1 women ‘On their Way’ through the asylum/migration nexus in the Republic of Ireland (Fernando 2016a). Stuart Hall (1992) described three phases of encounter between ‘the West and the rest’: trans-Atlantic slavery, European colonization, and post-Second World War migration. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Nilmini Fernando n.fernando@griffith.edu.au JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2020.1859207