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- Convenors:
-
Martin Lundsteen
(University of Barcelona)
Cecilia Vergnano (KU Leuven)
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- Discussant:
-
Daniel Monterescu
(Central European University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we explore urban bordering and the capacity to produce spaces of mobility and immobility, deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation, identification and criminalization, as well as the use of borders and boundaries to resist the dominant mobility and spatial regimes.
Long Abstract:
European liberal democracies are truly at a turning point. At a time when human mobility is ever-increasing many European countries still struggle with fully accepting migrants and other minorities. In this context, EU member states are introducing social policies and laws that police and reinforce social boundaries under the guise of maximising security, thereby undermining the idea of liberal democracy. Indeed, these social, political, and legal practices comprised in what social scientists have labelled bordering – i.e., measures taken to attain social order and gain legitimacy by demarcating categories of people to incorporate some and exclude others – form a worrying pattern with far-reaching consequences. Nonetheless, it remains understudied how this bordering works in and through urban space.
Consequently, this panel aims to explore the diversity of urban bordering in its capacity to produce spaces of mobility and immobility, of deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation, of identification and criminalization, as well as the ways in which people use borders and boundaries to resist, modify, mitigate or even dismantle the dominant mobility and spatial regimes. From the control, surveillance, and punishment of informal street economy practices and their relation to “citizen security”, to the campaigns of zero-tolerance, civility, or community embellishing policies, or residential segregation, gentrification, or forced social mix, this panel aims to bring together researchers who wish to share their research on the conditioning factors of mobility in the city, institutional violence anchored in the territory and, in general, how bordering is understood, narrated, monitored and managed regarding urban space
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -Corinna Angela Di Stefano (University of Konstanz)
Paper short abstract:
Looking at the health access situation for EU citizens from Rumania and Bulgaria living under precarious life conditions in Frankfurt am Main, this contribution analyses the interrelations between homeless im/mobilities and internal de/bordering practises on an urban scale.
Paper long abstract:
Capturing views and interpretations of 16 social workers and medical frontline staff interviewed between 2020 and 2023, this contribution takes a closer look at the interrelations between homeless im/mobilities and internal de/bordering on an urban scale in the realm of migration and health care access. A considerable part of the homeless in Frankfurt am Main are EU citizens once immigrated to Germany in search for employment from Bulgaria and Rumania and now live in precarious life situations without any social entitlements or healthcare insurance after years of informal work. Although Frankfurt am Main provides a relatively well-positioned humanitarian healthcare network, accessing these structures is not an automatism. An ‘im/mobility lense’ allows us to understand the barriers that manifest already before access, on different levels, from caring for one’s health in the most basic way in form of sleep, up to the actual access to medical consultation and treatment. The analysis focuses on the implications of criminalized immobility/enforced mobility on an urban scale, the immobile purposes of mobility nodes and public transport for the unsheltered population, and eventually the role of the mobile and mobilizing humanitarian health care.
helen klein (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Paper short abstract:
This study examines how borders are done in public space. Approached from a practice-theoretical perspective, I assume that borders are sth. that we do, rather than sth. that is only at the lime of a nation. Actors of the city’s borderscape are: local government, symbolic places, NGOs and citizens.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2017, ports and airports open to international traffic created a 10-kilometer rayon within which identity checks are legal, which includes many French metropoles and cities. Chambéry is one of them. This study examines how borders and boundaries interact in public space. I approach this question from a practice-theoretical perspective, assuming that borders are also something that we do, rather than only something that is on the limes of a national territory. Methodologically I follow a qualitative approach, drawing upon semi-structured interviews. Results show that borders are simultaneous done and undone in the cityscape. Whereas supra-national and national do borders on a rhetoric, juristic, geographic and administrative level, the local government and local NGOs, undo borders through local initiatives. But symbolic borders are also a constant part of the cityscape: they materialize from buildings to odonymia. Finally, doing borders in the cityscape differs between migrants and older adults. First, whereas migrants are confronted with geographical withdrawal, older adults engage actively within their environment, occupying space. Secondly, geographic migrants are confronted with emotional withdrawal due to the social practices of bordering they experience, done by the older adults. Concluding, approaching borders as something that we do, opens new ways of theoretical thought on empirical research within border studies. This research on borders within the cityscape shows how borders (political and territorial) and boundaries (symbolic and social borders) are a constituent part of one another.
Mohammad Ahsan Cheema
Paper short abstract:
This project looks at the importance of social gatekeeping and narrative around body agency in constructing borders within urban centers. In this project, intra-urban borders are looked upon as both physical and nonphysical spaces and to what extent mobility is accessible based on your body agency.
Paper long abstract:
This project looks at the importance of social gatekeeping and narrative around and about body agency in constructing borders within urban centers. In this project, intra-urban borders are looked upon as both physical and nonphysical spaces and to what extent mobility is accessible based on your body agency. This project looks at the borders that are constructed around transgender communities within the city of Lahore, leading them to formulate their own distinct culture, communities, and hierarchy system, formulating their own gatekeeping border as a counter-narrative. These borders entail limited access to education, livability, movement, and economic/social mobility. The case of Lahore is taken as it is one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the post-colonial state of Pakistan that is not only constructed by legal B/ordering but social as well. Another reason why Lahore has been selected is that historically the City had accepted multiple genders and for that matter is also one of the first states to accept a third gender as the legal entity, but has also suffered from a colonial modern binary narrative that is not highjacked by the clerical elite. Hence this study looks at the question as to how social narratives and agency over one's own body impact the structure of the city and the experience of within city spaces for subalterns and individuals. To collect data, I will be using in-depth interviews with three-step coding and self-ethnography to present two narratives and two separate borders existing around body agency.
Aglaia Sakellari (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
A case study of a queer grassroot collaboration formed by ethnically segregated groups in Nicosia, Cyprus. This ethnographic account of a Bicommunal Pride March that took place in a UN-authorized area, brings forth issues of belonging,exclusion and bordering, in Europe's last divided capital.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation follows an ethnographic account of resisting and defying the bordering practices of opposed bureaucracies taking place in Cyprus’ Buffer Zone. Following the events of 1974 that split the island into two separate political entities, a Greek Cypriot sovereign and a Turkish Cypriot de facto state, present-day Cyprus is marked by a temporary-turned-permanent ceasefire lane, the United Nations Buffer Zone. In recent years, a golden passport scheme backed by the sovereign state, has repositioned a class analysis on the right to citizenship and the role of transnational migration in state bordering practices and belonging.
On June 2023, the 2nd Bicommunal Pride March hosted in the UN-authorized area, became a signifying moment for queer activists across the divide, forming a grassroot collaboration that highlighted not only how borders are being enacted on the liminality of sovereignty, but also how they can be bypassed by non-binary activism. The ‘wildflowers’ of Cyprus, an emic symbolism of untamed existence in landscapes of ruination and decay, become a documentation of queer praxis, in ways that defy essentialist notions of gender, nationhood and belonging.
A story about a no-man’s-land where (non)citizenship ceases to exist, where deviant bodies are constantly faced with a ‘temporary (im-)mobility’. Informed by a six month ethnographic fieldwork, this is a case study of a queer breakaway from contested nationalisms that further territorialize ethnic segregation and produce political apathy through spatiotemporal stagnation. Can ‘Queer Cyprus’ bring forth the arbitrariness of bordering, by stating the inherent fluidity of being and moving through chronotopes?
Alice Elliot (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
How does vision shape the experience and possibility of urban space? Tracing the premises and consequences of seeing and being seen by the state, this paper addresses urban bordering by reflecting on an ongoing social action/research collaboration on racial profiling and policing in Italy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper traces how police encounters radically shape the experience and possibility of urban space. Addressing emerging debates in Italy around racial profiling in police work, the paper focuses specifically on vision, and the premises and consequences of seeing and being seen – noticed, addressed, scrutinised – by the state. Connecting academic and activist work around everyday bordering with critical engagements with the phenomenology and racial politics of sight, the paper reflects on the intersecting fields of ‘skilled visions’ (Grasseni 2007) operating and defining the urban landscape in a provincial town of northern Italy run by an explicitly anti-migrant local administration. The paper draws on the ongoing work of ‘Progetto Yaya,’ a social action/research collaboration on racial profiling and racist policing in Italy, born from the migrant-led collection of testimonies of police encounters in town. Reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of collaborative research in a context of heightened policing and violent horizons of ‘security,’ the paper begins to draw out the power of sight to define and transform the urban landscape.
Alina Jašina-Schäfer (University of Mainz)
Paper short abstract:
This study explores urban/social changes in a German city, caused by post-1990s migration from the former USSR. Focusing on a new neighbourhood dubbed “the East”, it reveals a dynamic process of “being with”, challenging East/West dichotomies and showcasing interdependencies and transformations.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I explore the process of urban and social reconfiguration in a southwestern German city, caused by migration of people from the former Soviet Union since the 1990s. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic research conducted in 2022, I trace the urban construction of a new neighbourhood, referred to by some local residents as “the East” in the Western context – a space perceived as “oriental” and problematised in a way that reinforces the opposition between the “self” and the “other”. However, contrary to simplistic East/West dichotomies or narratives of a segregated and abandoned space, in this paper I uncover a dynamic process of “being with” in a world of mutual urban interdependencies, ontological differences, and transformations caused by migration. By analysing how “being with” is enacted daily, I argue, it is possible to see “East” and “West” as adaptable categories, influenced by continuous boundary-making and remaking, by everyday interactions and the engagement of different actors. “Being with” thus marks a reality of ambiguity in the context of post-Cold War Europe rather than polarity, serving as a backdrop from which something new can emerge.
Corina Tulbure (West University of Timișoara - GRECS, University of Barcelona) Natalia Caicedo (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
For migrants with an irregular status, housing precarity acts as a barrier for safe reporting when they are victims of a crime
Paper long abstract:
Safe reporting of a crime has been linked to the fear of deportation. When migrants with an irregular status are victims of a crime, they face difficulties or are hesitant to fill a complaint before the police officers and juridical institutions due to the risk of deportation (Delivino, 2019; González, 2019). However, little attention has been paid to the connection between the access to housing and the violation of basic rights, including the safe reporting of a crime.
For migrants with a precarious legal status, housing could be a factor which increases the risk of being victim of a crime, since migrants suffer scams related to room rentals. Similarly, living in precarious settlements increases the likelihood of being victim of physical violence. However, housing is also a factor which hinders safe reporting further than the idea of deportation. In cases in which house and workplace overlap, filling a complaint because of labour exploitation or sexual aggressions is not an option. In all the exposed cases, the housing situation plays a key role not only as a cause of vulnerability of those victims of a crime, but also in their decision to fill a complaint.
We present an anthropological-legal study which explains the interrelation between precarious housing and safe reporting of a crime, working as a cumulative segregation within the city of Barcelona, the urban border. It describes the impact of the lack of access to housing, the (im)possibility of defending the violated rights and the existence of state-induced impunity.
Georgina Christou (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the political costs of gentrification by asking how activist subjects are produced as evictable through forms of bordering that involve racialization and securitization discourses, as well as resistance to such processes, in Exarchia, Athens.
Paper long abstract:
The neighbourhood of Exarchia in central Athens, Greece has been an area with great political and historical significance for anti-authoritarian struggles, solidarity, and social justice initiatives. In recent years, it has faced extensive gentrification through touristification and through militarization of public space, as well as eviction of several political squats hosting migrants and antiauthoritarian Greek activists. As part of a research project that examines the underexplored political costs of gentrification processes, this paper aims to analyse the discursive strategies of racialization and securitization that produce subjects as evictable and make such eviction possible. The paper builds on, and further substantiates, van Baar’s concept of ‘evictability’ (2016) which he uses to capture new biopolitical mechanisms of expulsion that target both migrant and citizen populations, in an attempt to challenge ‘the nation-state’ as the quintessential form of bordering by showing how ‘internal Others’ also undergo bordering and expulsion within nation-states as well. The paper examines the forms of racialized bordering enforced in Exarchia, that involve discourses and processes that attempt ‘to restore Greekness’ in the area, with ‘Greekness’ here marked as ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’. It further attempts to outline resistance to such forms of bordering, forced mobility and eviction by exploring how residents and activists persist on staying put, by, among other, actions of re-appropriating space and calling upon collective memory and identity of place to fight the ‘de-rooting’ they experience. The paper speaks to debates on bordering and eviction within urban areas and resistance to gentrification.
Seyma Yetkin (CEU)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores contested placemaking practices in Saint-Denis, where urban b/ordering is being reconfigured for the spatio-temporal needs of the 2024 Olympic Games. It sheds light on situated tensions and fragmentations within this assemblage, amassed through urban entrepreneurial ambitions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper shed lights on the contested place-making practices in Saint-Denis, a stigmatised banlieue on the northern periphery of Paris, at a spatio-temporal conjuncture where b/ordering practices are being reconfigured in multiple ways to meet the needs of the approaching Olympic Games. B/ordering, in this study, is understood beyond the image of stable walls, as pliable socio-spatial interventions that mediate the operationalisation of urban entrepreneurial ambitions. The shifting dynamics of b/ordering assemblage through laws, regulations at the national and municipal levels (1) mobilise disposable migrant labour to meet the urgent infrastructural needs of the mega-event, and (2) remake Saint-Denis into an urban site of hope, investment, and infrastructural violence. The paper explores a bottom-up understanding of the situated tensions in this process, based on an ethnographic fieldwork in Saint-Denis, across its multiple urban nodes of "otherness" and "low-end globalisation", created through differential belonging to metropolitan Paris, yet distinctly shaped by its socio-material conditions. The complex milieu of the study offers an analytical liberation from the dichotomous narratives often associated with the corporatised mega-events, i.e., the global absorbing the local. Rather, the field is considered as a fractured, multi-scalar “meeting place” relationally analysed through its precarious fragments, where workers, vendors, activists engage in multiple practices of making and remaking of urban space as the political, material, and social possibilities and constraints are being rearticulated.