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Paper short abstract:

Framed by and expanding the widespread perception that contemporary borders are vacillating and multiplying, scholarship in the field of borders and migration studies has cast its attention away from borderlines towards the assemblage of procedures and regulations, physical infrastructures and modular components that defines the social life of bodies and things in circulation.

Paper long abstract:

Framed by and expanding the widespread perception that contemporary borders are vacillating and multiplying, scholarship in the field of borders and migration studies has cast its attention away from borderlines towards the assemblage of procedures and regulations, physical infrastructures and modular components that defines the social life of bodies and things in circulation. In this logistical landscape, migration infrastructures, as tangible and intangible manifestations of state power aimed at taming mobility, become important loci in the articulation and conditioning of the spatialities and temporalities of human movement. Yet, conceptualising migration infrastructures exclusively as a functional by-product of the calculative logics that dis/enable human movement, seems inadequate to fully unpack their complex spatialities and temporalities. The paper addresses this inadequacy revealing instead their unstable ontology.

More specifically, the paper offers studies the everyday, place-specific and embodied dynamics that animate the social life of the “Extraordinary Reception Centres” set up in a central Italian province to host asylum seekers until their claim is resolved. It investigates how various histories and stories intersect, form and transform each other in the rooms of these hotels, schools, rural houses and apartments and, in so doing, it a) disentangles the uneven development dynamics that explain their existence, b) exposes their deep connections to the urban contexts and communities which surround them, and c) explains how they are differentially experienced by those inhabiting and exposed to them, engendering in turn diverse engagements. Migration infrastructures possess their own social life and, through an appreciation of the unstable ontology of this basic unit of research, the paper argues that these Centres renders state power and violence both concrete and unstable.