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 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.