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- Convenors:
-
Usman Mahar
(University of Zurich)
Martin Sökefeld (LMU Munich)
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- Discussant:
-
Sabine Strasser
(University of Bern)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 303
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
We wish to engage with the dilemmas of de-migranticising migration studies and de-exceptionalising migrants more generally: How can migration research avoid the pitfalls of migranticisation and exceptionalisation yet point to lived differences created by the state between citizens and migrants?
Long Abstract:
Calls for seeing migration as “autonomous” and the “de-migranticisation” of migration studies or undoing the essentialising and exceptionalising of migrants and refugees have been voiced for some time. Such calls rightly aver that migration studies reproduce and normalise categories derived from a statist perspective. While we fully agree with emphasising the autonomy of migration (AoM) and the various strategies to de-exceptionalise migration, from differentiating analytical and discursive categories to not making migrants the unit of analysis, we contend that such efforts do not result in the de-exceptionalisation of migrants and refugees in their daily lives and social positions in a bordered world of nation-states. Moreover, not poignantly differentiating irregularised migrants and refugees from citizens in our research runs the danger of eclipsing the powerful mechanisms of states that strictly limit their agency by not allowing people to work or placing them under severely restrictive conditions. What might be obscured is the fundamental difference that the nation-state system creates between citizens and refugees/migrants. This difference becomes most apparent in people’s deportability: Since citizens cannot be forcibly removed, subjects of removal are solely non-citizens. (Irregularised and criminalised) migrants, by default, become the unit of analysis in research on phenomena such as deportation and removal. Thus, we ask how far can “doing” AoM and “undoing” migranticisation go without obscuring the exceptional power of the state? We call for papers that address the double-edged swords of autonomous and de-exceptionalised migration at conceptual, ethnographic, ethical and political levels to tease out what they un/do.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The paper draws on ethnographic research among undocumented migrants in Norway and France, and argues that conceptualizing temporality as multiple, uneven and relational contributes to strengthening analytical understandings of migration, while simultaneously avoiding chronopolitical othering.
Paper long abstract:
Recent work in the anthropology of migration has criticised a tendency to place migrants in a different temporality from non-migrants, arguing that such analysis is a denial of coevalness in Fabian’s sense. The critique of how the chronotopes of migration research function as ‘othering’ devices, echoes calls to ‘de-migranticise’ migration studies that has gained traction within the field. We sympathise with these calls to complicate the migrant/non-migrant binary and to problematise how the temporalizing frames of research may contribute to a chronopolitical othering, and thereby to reproduce racialised and (post)colonial structures of power. Utilising a shared temporal framework, for instance, ‘neo-liberal capitalism’ and its embodied effects as an analytical frame, can destabilise neat partitions between migrants and citizens. However, such an approach also risks obscuring important temporal differences. We therefore argue for an approach that does not assume, a priori, a temporal difference between ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’, but still allows us to recognise and investigate how chronopolitics and temporal multiplicities are implicated in constructing and reinforcing difference, in governance, and in the lived experiences of differently situated people. In making this argument, we draw on anthropological and feminist perspectives that conceptualise time as multiple, uneven and relational, as well as our own ethnographic research with undocumented migrants in Norway and France within the project “Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration”.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers the everyday as a conceptual print to unpack lived differences created by state orders while eluding the dangers of migranticisation. Thinking in terms of entanglements and temporalities, the everyday bares how power and domination are enacted horizontally and unevenly navigated.
Paper long abstract:
How can ethnographic research escape the pitfalls of exceptionalising migration without, at the same time, euphemising the power of state orders that discriminate between legal and illegal mobilities, citizens and non-citizens? Reflecting on this dilemma, this paper proposes an ethnography of the everyday as a conceptual footprint to address both the need to consider migrant experiences beyond essentialised categories and the imperative of doing justice to the inequalities imposed on people deprived of legal and political rights. Far from being simply synonym of mundane, the everyday opens an analytical framework that reconnect people’s experiences and subjectivities with the analysis of the power dynamics that informs the socio-economic and political contexts in which they unfold. It does so by performing a double analytical operation outlined by Guillaume and Huysmans (2018): reintroducing the emplaced, dense entanglements of lives while also fostering a fleeting and multiple understanding of temporality. Attentive to the dynamics shaping structural inequalities, this double analytical movement exposes the spatio-temporal and relational operations of power that shape people’s lives differently depending on their situation. In doing so, the everyday carves a horizontal understanding of power that exposes how socio-economic and political domination un/do people’s rights to exist. Such manifestations of power are made particularly manifest in the interrelated diptych of people’s uneven rights to public presence (Lefebvre 1968) and to a future (Rapport 2017). An ethnography of the everyday hence offers an analytical detour to address the double-edged sword of de-migranticising migration studies, revealing existential differences without essentializing them.
Paper short abstract:
The migration of Ivorian women to Europe involves confrontations with border mechanisms and gender-based violence. Analysing their lived experiences, I highlight how the autonomy of migration and state governance politics form a continuum in their individual migration trajectories.
Paper long abstract:
Within the context of the "European migration crisis," there has been a marked surge in Ivorian women seeking asylum in Italy. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), their numbers escalated nearly sixfold between 2015 and 2019. This study delves into the life stories of Ivorian women I have been accompanying since their arrival in Italy in 2017 as asylum seekers. Confronting semi-legal journeys, fragmented intimate and affective relationships, and the intricate labyrinth of asylum procedures, they eventually established themselves in Paris by the close of 2021. Examining the autonomous migration routes of Ivorian women across Europe, this paper analyses how spatial disruption is enacted against European borders in an interplay between formal and informal dimension of migration, thereby oscillating between visibility and invisibility to EU states. Engaging in a continuous negotiation between migrants and state governance, categories such as "asylum seekers," "refugees," and "irregular migrants" are done and undone. Through a phenomenological angle, I aim to elucidate how formal and informal dimensions constitute a continuum rather than a juxtaposition in the lived experiences of Ivorian women, where they navigate a continuous transition between these dimensions in their efforts to fulfil personal aspirations.
Paper short abstract:
The paper shows the impact of institutionalized inequalities on intra-diasporic tensions. Exceptionalising war movers from Ukraine as “refugees” by the Polish institutions and the general society means de-exceptionalising or rather – de-refugizing other Ukrainians living in Poland before 2022.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is based on fieldwork with Ukrainian migrants (including war migrants), conducted since 2021 in three Polish cities. The title refers to the legislation created in Poland ad hoc after February 24, 2022, treating people who arrived from Ukraine after that date as exceptional and care-worthy. They faced a simplified residence procedure, an employment path, easier access to medical care, language learning, and free transport. They were recognized as refugees. This is a term with which many of them do not identify due to the sense of threat to their agency and being labeled as deprived of capitals. In turn, those who have lived in Poland for many years, or even arrived there a few months before the war escalated, remain invisible. Meanwhile, contrary to popular beliefs, the latter were also affected by the war - by loss of property, the impossibility of returning, anxiety about the fate of relatives, and uncertainty. However, they do not have the privileges and “discursive vulnerability” provided to "later" movers. Different institutional perspectives on assessing who deserves and who does not deserve special treatment due to the full-scale war in Ukraine causing increasing inequalities in access to social benefits, which in turn cause internal Ukrainian-Ukrainian tensions in Poland, incomprehensible for the rest of society. Ukrainian diasporans use and reproduce the Polish law (blurred) categories and the social constructions of “a (war) migrant from Ukraine”. Tracing social constructs of “these other Ukrainians” reveals intra-diasporic tactics of inclusion/exclusion and potential conflicts.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses disappearances and border deaths of refugees and migrants as inherently an exceptional phenomenon. I argue that only by insisting on this exceptionality we can seek to bring questions of accountability to the fore. This does not, however, preclude paying attention to their agency
Paper long abstract:
Recent attempts to normalise or, rather, de-exceptionalise cross-border human mobility has been an attempt to shift focus from nation-state-centred viewpoints to the agency of refugees and migrants themselves. While this shift has understandable and recommendable analytical and moral grounds, the problem often persists that there is also something exceptional about the many migratory trajectories which take place in the context of enforced clandestinity and illegalisation, on dangerous routes, and under the threat of violence. There is, thus, a tension between two analytical points of departure: on the one hand, refugee and migrant agency and action and, on the other hand, state and intra-state action.
This paper is based on research into refugee and migrant disappearances at Greek-Turkish borderlands. I analyse refugee and migrant disappearances and border deaths as a phenomenon distinct from other kinds of disappearances from the ‘ordinary missing’ to organised crime and warfare to enforced disappearances of political dissidents under authoritarian regimes. I argue that refugee and migrant disappearances and border deaths are set apart by the very conditions in which they happen: anti-migration policies, life-threatening crossings, border violence, lack of access to medical care or recourse to law, and undocumentedness. By insisting on their exceptionality, we can address such disappearances and border deaths with the seriousness they deserve and bring questions of accountability to the fore, give name to what is taking away thousands and thousands of lives every year. This does not mean abandoning refugees and migrants’ agency but, instead, ‘seeing the state’ with them.