Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to show that there is an unexplored link between human migrants who seek to enter Europe and objects in museum collections which are can be seen as accidental refugees. The narratives used to engage with these two categories are symmetrically and instructively deficient.

Paper long abstract:

In Europe, there has been little effort to link two kinds of refugees. The first is the human refugees who have become a subject of special concern since 2015. The other is those objects from outside Europe which have ended up in ethnological collections and museums, with little information on how they were acquired, transported and housed in Europe. The juxtaposition of these two categories suggests that they each suffer from deficient narratives and that both kinds of refugees cast light on the nature of legitimate movement, categorization, and display. In view of the current debates in Europe about colonial object collections and about human migrants, it is vital to place these debates in a common framework.

Paper short abstract:

Zooming in on the Caribbean, the paper is interested in discussing the Americas as space of entanglements which have from the outset connected the region to Europe and created persistent global inequalities It examines perspectives from the Americas as correctives for Eurocentric self-narrations.

Paper long abstract:

The Conquest of the Americas started a logic of coloniality (Quijano) as a structuring organizing principle which has been constitutive for Europe's self-narration "modern" - or, following Coronil as "Occidental." Serving as a 'tabula rasa' onto which Europeans could project their imaginations and construct of the conquered spaces "backwards," and ultimately, racialize them as non-white, the Americas served to justify the cruel exploitation of indigenous populations, the trade in enslaved humans an the exploitation of natural resources. Based on the logic of wealth accumulation, European "migrancy" to the Americas thereby set in motion an entirely new process of - often enforced - worldwide migrations. The Americas provide a showcase example for the close entanglement of European modernity with coloniality (Mignolo). Departing from this perspective, the paper discusses the Americas as closely entangled with Europe. Zooming in on the Caribbean as "threshold of global geopolitics" (Ceceña), the paper is interested in discussing the Americas as space of entanglements which have from the outset connected the region to Europe and created persistent global inequalities (as e.g. expressed in current migratory regimes). On the other hand, the paper examines perspectives from the Americas as possible correctives for imperial or Eurocentric self-narrations and ways to think alternative ways of the social. As a region marked by century-long experiences of creolization, anti-colonial resistance and conviviality of diverse populations, Europe might indeed learn from the Caribbean (and the Americas) - also to reveal persistent notions of purity and originality as fictions.

Paper short abstract:

By reading together the contemporary administration of asylum cases in Germany and the introduction of a centralized passport system in German South-West Africa this paper analyzes how contemporary and colonial mobility management produce migrancy and Europe as distinctly racialized phenomena.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes how colonial and contemporary mobility management dramatize the organization of belonging in Europe. Focusing on two scenes from the German context I illustrate how Europe captures and produces migrancy as a racialized practice distinct from Europe. I ask: how does the mobility management function to distinguish between Europe and migrancy? How can a colonial genealogy reveal the intimacy between migrancy and Europe that technocratic rationalities attempt to distinguish? First, I analyze the use of biometric technologies in the administration of asylum cases in Germany that intend to detect ethnic origin. Drawing on institutional memos and materials provided by migrants' rights NGOs I show how how migrancy is produced through the adjudication of belonging in Europe. Second, I read this contemporary administration of migration within a lineage of German colonial projects of controlling the movement of colonized populations. I analyze how colonial subjects were made legible and identifiable through analyzing the introduction of the legal responsibility for indigenous populations to carry identification in German South-West Africa. Through my analysis of colonial and contemporary forms of regulating the mobility of colonial and migrant populations and the technological and technocratic systems that dramatize that regulation I show that the the production of European space, subjectivity, and territory must be understood through the practices that racialize migrancy. Specifically, racializing technologies' function to make the body legible and visible is steeped in the genealogy of colonial control of populations and inform the management of migrancy in Europe in the present.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the ways in which Yugoslavs during the period of Non-Alignment struggled to fashion themselves as "good" Europeans without an imperial past, but ended up enmeshed in other European identity markers in the new world of decolonized nations.

Paper long abstract:

The Yugoslav region and the Balkans have been subject of malicious stereotypes and categories from those powerfully situated within European continent for centuries. There is a large literature about the creation/invention of the East of Europe, Europe's incomplete, backward and forever lagging cousin.

But what happens when the gaze is returned? More precisely, how did Yugoslavs fashion their own European-ness? I plan to explore this question with examples from travelogues and memoirs during Yugoslav involvement with the decolonizing world and the Non-Aligned Movement.

The question that drives the inquiry is whether the Yugoslavs through their involvement with the NAM managed to de-naturalize the dominant idea of European-ness (as "Christian" and "white") in the hegemonic Western European countries, who did not acknowledge the more transitory identities and unstable geographies that they created through their imperial adventures.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that in order to rethink the historiography of cities, the discussions of governance, the universe of policies and scholarship on migrants and cities, we need to develop a new analytical framework, which brings migrants and non-migrants into a common lens.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses city-making processes in three disempowered cities. On the basis of empirical research, it explores the intersecting pathways of people who are generally differentiated by scholars and policy makers as either migrant or non-migrant, on the city-making processes. It argues that in order to rethink the historiography of cities, the discussions of governance, the universe of policies and scholarship on migrants and cities, we need to develop a new analytical framework, which brings migrants and non-migrants into a common lens. This urges us to recognize and explicate the contemporaneity of all urban residents as city-makers, though operating within unequal networks of multiscalar power.

Paper short abstract:

Against the background of recent research projects along the so called Balkan Route the paper will adress the contours of the post-2015 European border and migration regime. It will show how "Europe" and "european citizenship" are constantly re-negotiated in the wake of this kind of "border work".

Paper long abstract:

Against the background of recent ethnographic research projects along the so called Balkan Route the paper will adress the contours of the post-2015 European border and migration regime. Based on the ethnographic border regime analyses-approach the paper sheds light on different recently emerging informal mechanisms, parctices and infrastructures like the Hungarian "transit zones" in the wake of the attampts by the EU and different nation states to regain control over the movements of migration since 2015. By drawing on insights of legal anthropology and infrastructural studies the paper shows how these overt and rather informal practices and materialities are heavily challenging the notion of "European citizenship", "European integration" and even the legal order of the European Union, not to mention the implications for the Geneva Refugee Convention.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the issues of mobility, "migrancy" and Europe as a fluid project, focusing on mainly the recent intra European migration, paying attention to different forms and ways of configuring the phenomenon in itself.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the issues of mobility, "migrancy" and Europe as a fluid project, mainly focusing on the recent intra European migration, paying attention to different forms and ways of configuring the phenomenon in itself. I attempt to analyze the topic of this panel by identifying and interpreting its main trends but mostly its nowadays irregularities and specific, individual narratives, considering the European macro and micro levels contexts in which all these are triggered and produced. My intention is to deconstruct the specific dynamics regular/irregular migration, addressing the question of the present days necessity and/or viability of classification trends regarding migration in different types of migration studies, making references especially to intra- European cases. Another relevant part of my paper underlines the ways in which the migration phenomena are contributive to continuous processes of "modeling" and redefining Europe, seen as a fluid, flexible entity, paying attention to their nowadays specificities in relation to the past. All these research questions are addressed to certain extents in my paper and the responses are given on the basis of the in-depth interviews and life histories recorded and documented when conducting fieldwork on this topic, in different parts of Europe (especially two Transylvanian villages/my native town and London). Implicitly, I intend to pay a special attention to the dynamics East/West within Europe (as well as at large) and in various Europeanist discourses regarding migration, entirely assuming the fact that my biographical experiences and cultural belongings affect deeply the research processes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will show and discuss that, despite of the political silencing of this background, not only migrations but also EU border politics draw and rely on long-standing (post)colonial histories of cross-Mediterranean Eurafrican and Eurasian entanglements.

Paper long abstract:

It is widely held that processes of Othering and bordering are constitutive for the powerful construction of an autonomous, sovereign, and supreme European self. Within these processes, however, the relevance of and dependency on long-standing entanglements, mobilities and exchanges with these 'Others' across these borders are being made invisible. Hence, Othering and bordering can be seen as imperial forms of governing by actively forgetting and demerging the 'familiar' of past circulations and connections.

With a view across the Mediterranean, this paper will focus on the paradox of fragmenting the constant flow of migrants and refugees in disconnected instants of 'new arrivals' that seem to require ever 'new' politics of bordering and integration. It is shown that not only migrations but also border politics draw and rely on long-standing (post)colonial histories of cross-Mediterranean Eurafrican and Eurasian entanglements. It will be argued that critical migration and Europeanization studies need to historicize their own conceptions of migration in order to self-critically reflect on their own contributions to the demerging politics of EU-European presentism.