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- Convenors:
-
Giovanna Cavatorta
(University of Catania)
Lorenzo Alunni (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 01/003
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel engages with the concept of vulnerability to enhance the discussion on the articulation between humanitarianism and securitarianism in regimes of mobility. It welcomes fieldwork-based contributions on how institutional vulnerabilisation affects migrants' chances of hoping and commoning.
Long Abstract:
Vulnerability constitutes a biopolitical category that asylum seekers, and more broadly migrants, are required to embody and exhibit to gain access to care and rights. As part of migration management technologies, the concept of vulnerability informs institutional recognition of what and how migrants can aspire to. But how is vulnerability allocated, negotiated and contested in encounters at the borders? What inequalities are both hidden and revealed because of the uses of the vulnerability framework? How does this entangle with matters of sovereignty?
This panel explores the vulnerabilising effects of the processes of assessing, certifying and reducing migrants' vulnerability. How recent transformations in border regimes and geopolitical arrangements reconfigure the social attribution of the status of 'vulnerable'? If migrants are increasingly read as the threat to biosecurity while "national" citizens are all declared vulnerable, is the moral imperative of protecting "the vulnerables" being transfigured? What does this tell us about the shifting politics of life in the humanitarian-securitarian nexus at the border?
Furthermore, as a prioritising logic, vulnerability can reinforce social asymmetries among migrants. In this perspective, how does this affect the relationships between migrants, public services workers and activists, and among migrants themselves? Hence, how enduring institutional vulnerabilisation within a framework of increased securitarisation is affecting migrants' capabilities to hope and share? Are we witnessing a rebordering between previously compatible moral economies around commoning?
The panel welcomes ethnographically grounded contributions from all over the world discussing one or more of the above questions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
With the pandemic, the “confine-to-protect” paradigm has introduced new hygienic-sanitary logics of bordering that have transformed the humanitarian-securitarian nexus. This paper analyses how the category of vulnerability has been redrawn under this new offshoring of the border.
Paper long abstract:
With the pandemic, the “confine-to-protect” paradigm has introduced new hygienic-sanitary logics of bordering that have transformed the humanitarian-securitarian nexus. The Italian case is, in this sense, paradigmatic: for the past two years, the Italian government has rented formerly private ferries to quarantine people arriving via boat in the Central Mediterranean and contracted the Red Cross to take care of them. This paper analyses how the category of vulnerability has been redrawn under this new offshoring of the border.
Having access to quarantine ships has been almost impossible for activists and researchers. I thus elaborate a double-entrance ethnographic perspective, one focused on the space and the other on the people. First, I accessed these boats as a “passenger” when they were used as normal ferries. Being on board of the ships as a “normal passenger” I became familiar with the spatialisation of the device. Second, I met people that were confined in those spaces (as well as people who worked there) when they were transformed by the quarantine device. At the port and in the city of Catania I listened to their stories, supported them and understood how vulnerability assessment is hampered by the complex legal-sanitary violences happening on these ships.
The analysis will discuss how this new extended temporality in a humanitarian space articulates with the securitarian surveillance of migrants’ possibility to imagine futures. Developing a militant anthropology approach, I will shed light on how the sea confinement sites re-shape the possibilities of commoning among migrants themselves, and with activists.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork on refugee resettlement in Kenya and the United States, the paper examines discourses of fraud and anti-fraud practices that reveal the twin processes of giving access and denying access to asylum and resettlement. Fears of the refugee as “fraud” now circulate globally.
Paper long abstract:
“Vulnerability” is a central category used in the adjudication of asylum, and the allocation of refugee aid and resettlement. In the nexus of humanitarianism and securitization, “vulnerability” also exists in opposition to other categories that are used to define who is unworthy; “fraud” is one such term. Based on long-term fieldwork on refugee resettlement processes in Kenya and in the United States, I examine discourses of fraud and anti-fraud practices that reveal the everyday workings of the twin processes of giving access and denying access to asylum and resettlement. In these processes, “fraud” is a term that is often employed by governmental and non-governmental agencies to refer to those who pose as members of priority categories: persecuted ethnic minorities; single mothers; orphans; or more generally having biographies of exceptional persecution or insecurity.
I argue that while the notion of the refugee as “fraud” pre-existed the War on Terror as a drain on humanitarian systems, this figure transformed in a post-9/11 period, reimagined in relation to Islamic terror. Over the past five to ten years, the figure of the refugee as fraud—the dangerous fake disguised as “the vulnerable”—has become unhinged from more specialized arenas of international humanitarian aid and immigration agencies, and has begun to circulate in broader public discourses in an age of nativism and xenophobia in the U.S. and around the world.