In this panel, we are interested in how the interplay between human mobility and development plays out in particular places. We suggest the ethnographic method to offer unique insight into this multi-scalar relationship between human mobility and development processes.
Long Abstract:
Mobility is increasingly caught up in processes of development, however conceived, at different scales. Access to justice for people on the move, whether they be international or internal migrants, is shaped not only by contemporary capitalist development but increasingly also by overlapping policy regimes that pursue various development objectives at national, regional, or even global levels. In this panel, we are interested in the multidirectional interplay between human mobility and development, understood as constituting both an 'immanent process' and an 'intentional practice' (Cowen and Shenton 1995). It is here that the ethnographic approach offers a unique opportunity, with its attention to the intersection between the global and the local, the macro and the micro, and - in its more refined form - its refusal of neat scalar distinctions.
This panel will entail a series of brief paper interventions, each of which will detail how these processes of migration and development unfold in a particular situated locale. A discussant will then briefly reflect upon how each of these spatially situated analyses gives expression to the general interplay between migration and development outlined above. Panellists will have an opportunity to respond to this reflection, with the aim of further drawing out the connections between the particular and the general. Questions will then be gathered from those in attendance in order to explore further the convergences and divergences between their respective sites of interest.
The paper identifies the ways in which uneven development trajectories intersect and are reproduced in the rooms of hotels, houses, schools and apartments used as reception centres for asylum seekers in a central Italian province.
Paper long abstract:
Framed by and expanding the widespread perception that contemporary borders are vacillating and multiplying, scholarship in the field of borders and migration studies has cast its analytical attention away from borderlines towards the assemblage of procedures and regulations, physical infrastructures and modular components that defines the social life of bodies and things in circulation. In this logistical landscape, migration infrastructure become important loci in the articulation and conditioning of the spatialities and temporalities of human movement, as they channel, facilitate and contain, accelerate and decelerate it.
These perspectives illuminate about the ways in which migration infrastructures make possible, and are in turn made significant by, human circulation. Yet, in defining infrastructures exclusively as the functional by-product of the governing logics that dis/enable human movement, they seem inadequate to unpack the ways in which migration infrastructure are deeply connected to patterns of uneven development. The paper addresses this inadequacy through an ethnography of the Extraordinary Reception Centres for asylum seekers set up by the Italian government in 2015, in a central Italian province. Such ethnography foregrounds three trajectories of uneven development that are reproduced in the rooms of these Centres: a global one, explaining the structural context in which migration to Europe takes place; a regional one, emphasising the uneven process of integration of European peripheral states; a national one, underscoring the significance of uneven incorporation of Italian regions into the national space. The paper draws from postcolonial and feminist conceptualisations of 'place' to develop these points.
This paper draws on the case study of Plaza de la Hoja - a social housing complex built for IDPs in Bogotá - to explore the contradictions inherent in development at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, while also highlighting the key role of social movements in the search for just urban futures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted with residents in Plaza de la Hoja - a social housing complex built for internally displaced people in Bogotá, Colombia - to explore the contradictions of 'immanent' and 'intentional' development (Cowen and Shenton 1995) at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, while simultaneously highlighting the role of social movements in the search for just urban futures. On the macro-level, Plaza de la Hoja reminds us that capitalist development in Colombia has contributed to the violent displacement of over eight million people (Oslender, 2007; Grajales, 2017), but also of the role of humanitarian norms in committing the Colombian state to protecting the displaced. The existence of the housing complex is a testimony to how development's production of 'relative surplus populations' is tempered by movements campaigning for a more 'protective biopolitics' (Murray Li, 2010, 2017). On the meso-level, Plaza de la Hoja reveals the 'splintering' (Graham and Marvin, 2002) of Bogotá's urban development, while simultaneously reflecting the potential of progressive social movements in the city. Illustrative of endemic territorial segregation in Bogotá, Plaza de la Hoja also represents an effort to reduce such segregation, as well as a response to demands for housing by the displaced themselves. On the micro-level, the everyday lives of the residents in Plaza de la Hoja are characterised by marginalisation and exclusion. At the same time, the housing complex has been positioned at the centre of resistance processes that challenge not only violence in Colombia, but also neoliberal development more broadly.
Beyond its borders, the EU border regime is implicated within capitalism's tendency to produce a relative surplus population. In the informal economy of Nouakchott, Mauritania, illegalised migrants are subject to state harassment which, in both form and function, resembles EU border violence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper details how the EU border regime's production of illegality (Andersson, 2014) is implicated in capitalism's tendency to produce a population that is surplus relative to its own reproductive needs (Li, 2017). It does so by examining the experiences of those illegalised by the border regime in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. Within disenfranchised pockets of its urban informal economy, there lie collective experiences of border violence and economic abandonment spanning the regions of North and West Africa. The paper first details people's experiences of illegalisation and border violence in a range of such locations at and beyond the EU external border, including in Nouakchott itself. This state of illegalisation is, however, a deeply contingent one, which raises the question of who is likely to be illegalised and why. The rest of the paper addresses this question by broadening its concern from exclusive experiences of illegalisation to the multifaceted processes of economic and social marginalisation, neglect, and abandonment in which migrants brutalised by the border regime are also caught up. This is evidenced in life histories and experiences encompassing exploitative formal employment in extractive industries run by multinational conglomerates, as well as precarious and intermittent informal employment as street vendors, car washers, construction workers, and domestic workers. As a consequence of this position of being surplus relative to the needs of capital, migrants are subject to state violence and harassment which, in both form and function, is strikingly similar to the illegalisation of the border regime.
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Paolo Novak (SOAS)
Karen Schouw Iversen (Queen Mary University of London)
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we are interested in how the interplay between human mobility and development plays out in particular places. We suggest the ethnographic method to offer unique insight into this multi-scalar relationship between human mobility and development processes.
Long Abstract:
Mobility is increasingly caught up in processes of development, however conceived, at different scales. Access to justice for people on the move, whether they be international or internal migrants, is shaped not only by contemporary capitalist development but increasingly also by overlapping policy regimes that pursue various development objectives at national, regional, or even global levels. In this panel, we are interested in the multidirectional interplay between human mobility and development, understood as constituting both an 'immanent process' and an 'intentional practice' (Cowen and Shenton 1995). It is here that the ethnographic approach offers a unique opportunity, with its attention to the intersection between the global and the local, the macro and the micro, and - in its more refined form - its refusal of neat scalar distinctions.
This panel will entail a series of brief paper interventions, each of which will detail how these processes of migration and development unfold in a particular situated locale. A discussant will then briefly reflect upon how each of these spatially situated analyses gives expression to the general interplay between migration and development outlined above. Panellists will have an opportunity to respond to this reflection, with the aim of further drawing out the connections between the particular and the general. Questions will then be gathered from those in attendance in order to explore further the convergences and divergences between their respective sites of interest.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -