Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with displaced people in the northern French and northern Moroccan borderlands, this paper explores the how of studying contingent camps; camps which are not architecturally fixed but caught in cycles of destruction and reinvention.

Paper long abstract:

While the camp is most often understood as a fixed, humanitarian or institutional space of confinement, hardened migration control strategies have given rise to ephemeral forms of encampment which stretch the scope of what we understand as camp spaces. This article explores methodologies for studying contingent camps; camps which are not architecturally fixed but dynamic and shifting, caught in constant cycles of destruction and reinvention. In their ephemerality, contingent camp spaces are under-explored and tend to evade scrutiny. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant people inhabiting contingent camps in and around the borderlands at Calais (France) and Tangier (Morocco), this article reflects on the methodological challenges of, and possibilities for, studying fleeting contingent camps which lack fixed boundaries and thresholds. In response to the uncertain ontology of these places, this article proposes a methodological approach grounded in assemblage

theory. It contends that contingent camps may best be explored as assemblages, through an experimental combination of embodied ethnography, forensic explorations of camp materialities, and the study of camp atmospheres through the immaterial practices of its residents. This article shows how a methodology grounded in assemblage may allow us to look beyond the camp as an explicit architecture of containment, to begin to understand how a camp logic insidiously permeates the materialities, atmospheres and temporalities of contingent camps.