Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on subjectivity, creativity and resistance amongst migration fluxes. Therefore, it draws on embodied experiences and social practices of migrants and social movements at the EU’s exterior borders by examining a place in Algeciras, Spain, where “illegal” refugees are given shelter by political activists.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on embodied experiences of migration. Therefore, it follows a phenomenological approach looking after experiences of the sentient body of "illegal" travellers and asks for creativity and resistance through processes of subjectivization amongst migration fluxes. This has two implications.

1. Theoretically: Searching for migrants' experiences, I turn towards the highly contested borders between Spain and Morocco, where the "social sorting" of mobilities by the EU (and the nation state) encounter dense processes of subjectivization through personal struggles. The focus on migrants' "border-experiences" can be a mirror of the situation at the border (Haller 2000), and they direct the attention toward the migrants' creative intercourse with daily life, but also towards their protests and/or artistic practices (often together with or even lead by transnational social movements). This will be object to an empirical exploration during an extended case study in Algeciras. In the centre of the ethnographic research (starting in November 2010) will be a place where "illegal" migrants is given shelter by political activists.

2. Methodologically: Embodied experiences are coined by sensual impressions such as smells, fear, hunger, abuse, happiness etc. To explore them and develop a "history from below", it needs a "sensuous scholarship, combining text and body, analysis and sensibility" (Stoller 1997: 48). As claimed by scholars of visual anthropology (as e.g. MacDougall 2006; Pink 2006), this ethnography will try to engage the senses by also using audiovisual recordings.