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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
Smuggling Crews (youth gang) broadcast their own labour as a critical engagement with border infrastructure. Netnogaphic and ethnographic field work reveals the intersection of state violence and emerging bordered youth culture symbolised in the figure of the smuggler on the frontline.
Paper long abstract:
The ‘war on mobility’ unfolds in the seemingly mundane borderlands of the Balkan route. Orban’s border fence requires meticulous organisation from those on the frontline (racialised youth) ‘working the borders’ in multiple occupations. ‘Working Crews’ produce collective agency in the face of extreme precarity at the borders. Thus communitarian performances broadcasted on social media accounts affords to social status, sense of in-group identity and place-making (territorialisation) from their own labour practices in human smuggling. Several hours of netnogrpahic video material and months of border ethnography and interviews uncovers how ‘working crews’ visually represent ‘working’ borders. This is achieved with the critical lens of seeing smugglers broadcasting "Border Spectacles From Below” (video content via social media platforms) that oppose and reinforce moral panics of migrant youth and criminality. The group broadcasts repertoires of action-oriented aesthetics in three ways: 1). ability/ingenuity to work as a group to smuggle humans in high intensity moments evading border control 2). Displays of resistance when reappropriating border material that are meant to symbolise European power and control 3) the group develop their own identities by transposing references (political, social and cultural histories, militarism and tribal and ethnic identities) from origin over European border materiality. Thus the smuggling ‘working crew’ symbolise expressions of struggle and confrontation to the direct and structural violence faced by racialised men and adolescent boys from past imperial projects and EUrope’s ongoing border regime, raising important questions to the intersection of state violence and expressions of emerging trans-bordered sub-cultures.
Navigating digital borders: the impact of digital platform work on migrant labour and mobility