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- Convenors:
-
Irene Peano
(University of Lisbon)
Céline Cantat
Colette Le Petitcorps (Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-F497
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel explores containment as a key feature of contemporary power relations through an examination of the dispositifs and techniques underpinning mobility control and resistance, across the domains of migration, labour and (re)production, among others.
Long Abstract:
This panel addresses techniques for the control of mobility as central features of contemporary power relations through anthropological analyses of simultaneously spatial, relational, symbolic and bodily forms of containment that pace people's movement according to multiple logics and goals, including those related to the organisation of (re)productive labour. We are interested in practices and techniques of containment implemented by international migration policies - through militarisation, externalisation and filtering, among others - that have a significant racialising dimension. These include detention as a paradigmatic dispositif of pacing, as well as other forms of containment through migrant reception centres, internal and international deportations, checkpoints, 'hotspots', push backs, and other bureaucratic practices that impede or impose, slow down or speed up and channel people's movement. We also welcome reflections on other forms of mobility control enacted through techniques that may trace longer genealogies (such as residency laws, incarceration, the revival of anti-vagrancy laws or labour regimes echoing the old plantation systems) plus analyses of the forms of gendered mobility containment which may be effected through various means of discipline, violence, deception, within the household or through religious and lay institutions. This panel aims at exploring the means through which containment is sought, along the symbolic, material, embodied rationalities and irrationalities of power relations, dispositives and techniques, seeking to find the relationships as well as the disjunctures between different regimes of mobility control. Finally, it looks into the forms of resistance, flight and camouflage employed to avoid or mitigate the effects of such containment.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the governance of coastal lands in Mauritius, pursuing the plantation system, creates a double containment of the local population: the reduction of their living space and mobility, and the confinement of women as maids in the domestic spaces of the new, wealthy settlers.
Paper long abstract:
On the western coast of Mauritius, the recent settlement of wealthy Mauritians and foreigners, the expansion of the touristic industry, and the development of residential gated areas on previous sugar fields and public beaches, have generated a double containment of the population of low income living there. The reduction of their living space and mobility, and the increasing diminution of land available for subsistence production, has led to the confinement of women, previously working for their household (in both productive and reproductive work, in and outside the home), in the domestic space of these wealthy others, to serve them for a low wage and without social protection. I argue that this process pursues the old plantation logic of land privatisation, however by shifting the use of land, from the production of goods for exportation, to the creation of areas of leisure and high living standards for an international upper class, where the services of local women are highly consumed. Using the empirical data collected from a previous fieldwork, I examine how the contemporary governance of the coastal land aims to, aside from profit making, control, pacify and "clean" the body of local women for domestic service, and hence to maintain a hierarchical and racialised social order in the zone. I will then analyse how some women refuse to serve in the homes, as an act of resistance both to the hierarchical social order and to the expropriation of the coastal space designed by this governance of the land.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses the proliferation of different, but intersecting forms of containment and segregation implemented in contemporary Italy. The development of agro-industrial districts is shown to interact with specific migration routes and their control.
Paper long abstract:
The paper analyses the proliferation of different, but intersecting forms of containment and segregation implemented in contemporary Italy. The development of agro-industrial districts is shown to interact with specific migration routes and their control. Based on over five years of participant, engaged research in several such districts and among its migrant-worker populations, as well as in the countries of origins of some such workers (most notably Nigeria and Romania, but also Bulgaria) it shows how institutional labour camps and supposedly more informal shantytowns, where migrant farm labourers have lived for over two decades, are contiguous to asylum-seeker reception centres, but also to migrant detention centres and prisons, as well as to those "ghettoes" that litter the sub-Saharan migration route to Europe. Thus, the regime of mobility control and its employment of dispositifs of apartheid (which fragment and aggregate populations along ethnic, racial, gender and citizenship lines), become functional to the production and re-production of a cheap, disposable, just-in-time labour force and of its reserve army. The paper builds on analyses of the camp form and its critiques, especially those centred on the political-economic dimension. Thus, it theorises the contiguity of forms of containment with the proliferation of so-called 'zones' in which a multiplicity of power dynamics coexist and interact, creating borders, spaces, (il)legal apparatuses, which have complex genealogies that intersect slave-trade, colonial and plantation regimes. At the same time, such regimes are ever imperfect attempts at containing continuously resurfacing, protean lines of resistance and flight.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the “(trans)carceral grip” of prison in Nicaragua at the hand of a gendered exploration of containment both within and beyond the prison compound.
Paper long abstract:
This paper follows a Nicaraguan youth as he leaves prison and becomes part of society again - only to be re-imprisoned. Through his encounters with the carceral state it explores gendered practices of social exclusion and containment, discussing the ideal of “social reinsertion” in light of both uneven carceral expansion and former prisoners’ own practices of freedom and self-censorship. The way in which this youth’s life is entangled with both drug-related crime and its intervention, and his relentless search for freedom and social valorisation allows for an examination of both the gendered politics of containment and prison’s transcarceral grip. Where the police and prison system project the moral high ground in the nation’s fight against “the corruption of our youth” (through their alleged involvement with drugs), these institutions simulteaneously hide their highly ambiguous relationship to both punishment and illegality – a relationship that is expressed both in gendered and extralegal daily practices. After all, drugs circulate widely inside prison and keep an equilibrium of powers in place. Drawing on extensive ethnographic prisons research (2009-2016) conducted in two medium-sized Nicaraguan prisons and sustained contact with former prisoners, including specifically this youth’s life trajectory, this paper explores why particular youth are confined to prison, how they are contained, and what meanings both freedom and containment acquire in their lives.
Paper short abstract:
France deploys strategies directed at containing and forcing the mobility of some EU citizens, by policing, detaining and deporting them. This paper reveals and analyses the technologies of confinement against Romanian citizens from the surveillance of "Roma camps" to immigration detention centres.
Paper long abstract:
While France operates a complex and massive deportation apparatus, the Romanian state has openly conceded to receive its deported citizens and to assist the French authorities in policing (ir)regular Romanian citizens. A bilateral agreement enables Romanian and French agents on the ground to identify, localise and police poor and destitute Romanian citizens. Based on securitization of mobility, a process in which people are considered criminals due to their lack of residential status, France develops technologies of racial confinement such as so-called Roma camps. This targeted enforcement, spatial containment and ethnic profiling notably against Roma ethnics is a prime example of state practices towards racialized and criminalised category of deportable citizens.
This paper builds on the research I have conducted between 2016-2017 in the Paris region among public servants, police officers, NGOs and private agents, administrative and judicial courts personnel, and people who were submitted to the deportation apparatus. Documenting and analysing the spatial exclusion coupled with bilateral police collaboration between France and Romania, the paper investigates the ways in which police surveillance, control and detention are used against undesirable EU citizens. At the same time, it exposes and problematizes forms of resilience and contestation from the part of those EU citizens who are recurrently exposed to state' technologies of confinement from the surveillance of "Roma camps" to the immigration detention centres.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the integration contract—mandatory in France for third country nationals—as a mechanism of racialization. It suggests that unlike the earlier integration mechanisms, the integration contract is a neoliberal tool that changes the ways in which colonial/racial difference is produced and managed.
Paper long abstract:
The integration mechanisms in France emerged within the context of colonial developmentalism in order to produce and manage the colonial racial difference within the metropole. Integration dispositif therefore comprised welfare and surveillance mechanisms including special housing and family settlement programs designed to ensure the reproduction of the colonial spatial divide and the protection of the sexual borders of the French nation. In this paper, I will examine the integration contract—mandatory in France for third country nationals—as a neoliberal mechanism of racialization that changes the ways in which colonial/racial difference is produced and managed. By signing the integration contract, the immigrant is not only made to own thus produced difference but also promise to disown it to be rewarded residency. Furthermore, integration is made the precondition for family reunification, reversing the former welfare state rationale. As a result, what was once defined as the responsibility of the welfare state is delegated to the individual migrant, opening up the way for the criminalization of difference qua the lack of integration. Thus invented, the individual “failure to integrate” becomes a justification for deportation. Combining a biopolitical perspective developed by Foucault and Agamben with Rüstow’s vitalpolitics, this paper examines the new ways in which racial difference is produced by French integration mechanisms, the implications of the emerging notions of race for the migrants as well as the ostensible borders of the French nation.