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- Convenors:
-
Georgina Ramsay
(University of Delaware)
Heath Cabot
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- Discussant:
-
Henrik Vigh
(University of Copenhagen)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Horsal 9 (D9)
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The label of "crisis" has solidified representations of the "refugee" as an exceptional category of person. In this panel we seek to de-exceptionalize displacement by considering how it is experienced across, and implicated in reconfigurations of, categories of citizen, refugee, migrant, other.
Long Abstract:
The rising number of people undertaking often-dangerous border crossings has been labelled by national governments, global media, and scholars alike a migration "crisis." Crisis language—its ahistorical tendencies, and its focus on urgency and intervention (Roitman 2013)—exceptionalizes migration as an urgent problem to be solved, making it easy to overlook the varied and contradictory ways in which migrants are represented, and in which migration is actually experienced. Further, such framing produces the "refugee" or "migrant" as a state of exception, as the antithesis to the figure of the citizen, often eliding modes of displacement, precaritization, and struggle that may be chronic (Vigh 2008), normalized, and perhaps even banal. In this panel we seek to move beyond such binaries to ask how categories of citizenship, and civic and political in- and exclusion, are being reconfigured. We consider that, in treating particular categories of politico-legal identification, such as the "refugee," as self-evident, scholars may risk overlooking and obscuring how the forces of precaritisation that contribute to displacement are experienced more broadly. In a period in which precarity may have become an increasingly pervasive context of everyday life for people across the globe (Allison 2012; Butler 2006; Hinkson 2017; Tsing 2015), de-exceptionalising displacement can be a way to consider forced migration not as an isolated problem that demands analytical attention and dedicated solutions, but as a product of broader and more globalised forces that may connect the experiences of people across politico-legal categories of identification.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Has the label of "crisis" focused attention toward exceptionalising the experiences of refugees, whilst overlooking the common forces of precarity that shape not only their lives but the lives of many?
Paper long abstract:
"So the government can provide for the refugees, but not the homeless we already have?" One viewer tweeted in response to a current affairs program on an American cable network in October 2016. That tweet managed, at once, to succinctly capture a common public sentiment used in the US to delegitimise support for refugees, whilst catalysing even more pervasive tropes of the binaries between citizen and refugee, local and global, us and them. But what if those categorical binaries were stripped away. Would the displacement experienced by one group differ significantly from the other? In many ways, yet not in others. Based on research conducted with refugees in situations of temporary asylum in Uganda, to refugees resettled permanently in Australia, to people, both migrants and non-migrants, who are homeless in the US, I argue here that the erosion of state support has become a condition of our time that characterises the lives of many, and not just those who have been persecuted and are unable to live in their home country. I consider here how the label of "crisis" has focused attention toward exceptionalising the experiences of refugees whilst overlooking the common forces of precarity that shape not only their lives but the lives of many.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on lived experiences of sub-Saharan migrants in Libya, this paper argues that a focus on the complex dynamics between mobility and immobility on unauthorised journeys is vital to understanding forces connecting people's mobility experiences and reconfiguring static categories of migration.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on the lived mobility experiences of sub-Saharan migrants and refugees in Libya, this paper examines the complex relationship between mobility and immobility on unauthorised journeys and its bearings upon static migrant categories. The label of 'crisis', often linked to the migration situation in Libya and the Mediterranean, tends to impose a linear understanding of movement and to fixate migrants as static legal-political bodies aiming for Europe. Through a multi-sited ethnography of migrants' unauthorised journeys through the Sahara desert and Libya by boat to Europe, the paper shows that migrants' mobilities are far from linear, reconfiguring typologized understandings of migrants as legal/illegal, forced/voluntary, refugee and asylum seeker in non-binary and fluid ways. Central to this argument is that the precaritisation of these journeys emerges from a dynamic between mobility and immobility that is often linked to commodification and social relations between a range of actors. I show how spaces of immobility in Libya, shaped by different criminal and state actors and the payment of money to move on, characterise migrants' precarious journeys: informal confinement, imprisonment in government-run detention centres, and waiting in private houses. The paper concludes by arguing that a focus on the dynamics between mobility and immobility, and taking journeys seriously as a topic of anthropological study, is vital to understanding forces connecting people's mobility experiences and reconfiguring static categories of migration.
Paper short abstract:
A situation of displacement is explored amidst transformation in the Australian government's approach to remote Aboriginal people. One Aboriginal woman's navigation of her new metropolitan life involves wrestling between exilic states and place-based ways of being human.
Paper long abstract:
When the state in relatively benevolent mode is replaced by a coercive governance regime, what responses are available to governed subjects? One option is to leave the places where hard governance takes hold, acting on the state's own promise that better life prospects are to be found elsewhere. This paper explores a situation of displacement at a time when the Australian government is shifting the terms of its engagement with Aboriginal people of small remote towns. It tracks the creative and energetic moves of a highly competent Aboriginal woman from the Central Australian desert as she navigates the new terms of her metropolitan life. Existential crisis and excruciating frustration are common as dreams of transformation come up against the realities of protracted unemployment, punitive welfare regimes, and the prefigured expectations of others. Anxiety, rapid-paced movement and digital communication collide with bureaucratic containment, resulting in ontological circumstances that, following Henrik Vigh (2009) we might describe as 'motion squared'. Travelling with Nungarrayi, we glimpse subtle differences and gruelling continuities experienced by Aboriginal people as they move between differently governed jurisdictions. Oscillating between crushing limbo and the euphoric promise of new found freedoms, between starkly opposed exilic states (Malkki 1995; Coutin 2016; Khosravi 2017), this paper tracks an intimate and intense wrestling between differently ordered forms of value and place-based ways of being human.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will examine the exceptionality of the figure of the unaccompanied minor as the product of "crisis talk" in Switzerland. I will zoom in on the strategies young people deploy to challenge these ambiguous categorisations and the precarious labour going into being "ordinary".
Paper long abstract:
During the summer months of 2015 the figure of the unaccompanied child refugee became the human face of the European "migration crisis" in Switzerland. While the categorisation as exceptional humanitarian cases or "perfect victims" (Ticktin 2016) gave unaccompanied minors access to opportunities asylum seeking youth over the age of eighteen did not receive, it simultaneously created the pressure to act according to specific expectations in order to fit in the picture of the dependent, innocent child refugee. In this paper I will examine these dynamics and suggest that the logic of "crisis talk" provokes the production of unstable and depoliticised exceptional humanitarian categories that constantly run the risk of morphing into their extreme opposites, thereby justifying a distinct biopolitics of exclusion. Based on insights from seventeen months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with unaccompanied refugee youth in Switzerland, I will show the strategies the young people deployed to challenge these ambiguous categorisations that continuously swing back and forth between treating them as vulnerable victims in need of protection and as threats to the economic and cultural integrity of the Swiss "national order of things" (Malkki 1995). I will pay particular attention to the young people's desires of being "normal" teenagers and to the ways they thought their exceptional status excluded them from fully participating in Swiss society. By zooming in on the experiences of one young woman from Eritrea, I will show the precarious social and emotional labour going into "doing 'being ordinary'" (Sacks 1984).
Paper short abstract:
Through a critique of crisis, this paper discusses the link between the management of mobility and the proliferation of humanitarian borders in Europe.
Paper long abstract:
The proliferation of humanitarian borders generates a politics of crisis that weakens the capacity to produce structural political change but also legitimizes exceptionalism and the reproduction of hierarchized borders. In this paper, I argue that a critique of crisis implies the possibility of moving beyond humanitarian borders and of re-collocating political change within the realm of ordinary politics. In contemporary Europe, a critique of crisis is a critique of power. It is a way to develop a political vision of borders and mobility beyond the humanitarian order of things. Ultimately, it is a way to give ordinary politics back the capacity to project the future by freeing it from humanitarian contingency.
Paper short abstract:
The coding of single cases of migration as crisis leads to an oversight of the overlapping migratory experiences in societies accustomed to living with mobility throughout their history. A comparative analysis of multiple waves of Aegean migration in the last century may help remedy that tendency.
Paper long abstract:
Often presented as an emergency situation or a state of exception by the international community or mass media, migratory phenomena tend to be addressed as isolated individual occurrences with an expiration date. This may have caused existing scholarship to oversee the everlasting existence of overlapping waves of migration in different social settings and the lack of broader historical perspectives within which these can be put into comparative analysis.
The paper is based on ongoing ethnographic and oral historical research in the Greek islands of Leros and Lesvos and the corresponding towns in the Turkish coastline. In addition to the imminent situation involving Syrian refugees, the case studies will include other episodes of migration in the Aegean that occured after turning points in the course of the last century: post-WWI, post-Catastrophe, post-WWII, post-civil war, post-junta, post-industrialization, post-Cold War, post-financial crisis, to name a few. As many of these took place within the lifetime of one or two generations, I argue that migration needs to be seen as an integral part of the living memory and everyday life in the Aegean. Through a comparative analysis of diverse experiences of displacement, I propose replacing the notion of 'crisis-management' with that of 'cultural accommodation' of migration -of how societies have at different times dealt with different waves of migration, and how these -when spatiotemporally contextualized- may help construct the basis for more effective strategies in response to migration.
Paper short abstract:
Case studies of internal displacement will show how the lumad creatively deal with this condition and transform it into acts of resistance. We will also reflect on the intersections of creating political options between the indigenous, radicalized peasant, and 21st-century occupy-style movements.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will present two ethnographic case studies of the 'displacement' experienced/expressed by Manobo indigenous peoples (or lumad) of Mindanao (southern Philippines), in the context of state and development aggression in the past three decades that have seen an intensification of mass evacuations (locally called bakwit) into metropolitan centers like Davao City. Interacting closely with non-indigenous, urban-based groups for both material and non-material support, they learn to maximize their lengthening stays in their 'places of refuge' in metropolitan centers by launching broad social education campaigns, such as the 'lakbayan' or 'people's political sojourns' to other major cities of the Philippines in order to popularize their causes. How do we view bakwit and lakbayan as a new mode of action in relation to the range of politico-cultural options historically demonstrated by Mindanao indigenous communities and radicalized peasants? How potent and sustainable is this mode of action? Is this phenomenon an indigenous movement equivalent to the early-21st-century surge of 'occupy movements'? The ethnographic cases will show how the lumad are creatively dealing with their perennially displaced situation by identifying with it and transforming it into acts of political resistance. As anthropologist-advocates, we will present reflexive insights on the importance of the intersections of struggles, visions and organizational forms that emerge from the 'indigenous movement' of southern Philippines.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues against narratives of crisis and biopolitical governance to propose that we re-center the concept of human in examining contemporary migration and displacement. This would allow us to move past legal categories and binaries to understand the global forces shaping inequality today.
Paper long abstract:
While the concept of biopolitics and states of exception have largely framed the conversation on precarity within migration, displacement, encampment and refugee governance, I argue that we can understand these iterations of vulnerability better by moving beyond political-juridical categories. If contemporary large-scale displacements can be read not as states of exception but as normalized forms of governance in a racialized world, how can we reframe narratives of citizenship to take this into account? This paper looks at everyday experiences and narratives of humanitarian aid in Tanzania's Nyarugusu refugee camp to explore some of the ways in which refugees conceive of their predicament and articulate claims that exceed the framework of refugeehood and citizenship. By examining how camp residents, largely from the Democratic Republic of Congo, experience and describe their condition, I aim to shift discussions of refugee life away from the contemporary focus on biopolitics towards individual experiences of humanitarian, corporeal, and occult realities. I suggest that black feminist theory, particularly as articulated by Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, with its focus on the politics of the flesh and the body, provides a more appropriate framework for examining questions surrounding refugeehood. Frustrated with inadequate and unpredictable humanitarian assistance, refugees make claims to humanity/inhumanity based on bodily vulnerability and the loss or lack of corporeal integrity. I suggest that foregrounding the category of "the human" allows us to better understand global realities that move us beyond narratives of crisis.