Paper short abstract:

Mass media mediated imagination works as transformative power of social and cultural reality. This paper analises how actors' migration-related knowledge practices and social imaginations collaboratively negotiate, shape and challenge the dominant European border regime in Euro-African borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

In today's globalised world the workings of imagination are a central source for the formation of social and cultural practices (Appadurai). They fuel migrant mobility. Mediated by mass media and new technologies providing an immense reservoir of new discourses and images about other possible lives, "social imagination" operates as socially-speculative knowledge and transformative force affecting people's daily lives .

To this effect, the Euro-African space between Moroccan Rabat and Spanish Murcia constitutes not only a contested postcolonial, lethal borderland and zone of changed and renewed migrant movements shaped by a shared history of "entangled modernities" (Conrad/Randeria), but involves furthermore a landscape of (virtual) communications, imaginaries and knowledge-practices.

Adopting a post-/decolonial perspective in critical migration studies this paper is concerned with the current regime of border, relations of power and knowledge established by the hegemonic EU policy of migration management; a constellation that is constantly challenged, altered and co-created by migrant movements. Pointing to selected social contexts in "cosmopolitised" (Beck/ Sznaider) Rabat and Murcia I firstly map the assemblage of local actors participating in transversal knowledge production - migrants' associations and civil society, NGOs, intergovernmental organisations and EU-agencies. It comprehends the negotiation of dominant and minorised discourses just as knowledge-practices and co- or counter-imaginations about migration projects to Europe. Secondly, I analyse how these social imaginations are practised (Römhild) and inform improvised arrangements and solidary alliances between putative settled nationals and migrants in social and political struggles, like the first Moroccan migrants trade union section ODT-I or the Spanish anti-eviction platform PAH.