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- Convenors:
-
Ignacio Fradejas-García
(University of Oviedo)
Noel B. Salazar (CuMoRe - KU Leuven)
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- Discussant:
-
Helena Pettersson
(Umeå University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Mobilities
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to understand the rules that govern mobility and how mobility regulations and codes are resisted, transgressed, broken and remade in social power fields. In short, how are people navigating rules of mobility in practice?
Long Abstract:
To play by the rules of (im)mobility means moving along habits and laws governed by social norms and institutional control. Our point of departure is that both social and institutional mobility rules abound, and are intertwined, but routinely disputed by individuals, groups and institutions. Power is the ability to make rules for others but also the capacity to govern, enforce, or break mobility rules.
At a formal level, mobility rules and practices of control operate through mobility regimes that regulate complex systems at multiple scales. At an informal level, individual and groups produce their own mobility rules that clash and mix with formal rules. Formal and informal rule players may benefit from the flexible interpretation of rules and the grey zones resulting from overregulation, overlap and lack/excess of control. Unwritten rules and hidden practices of mobility smoothen the path to shortcut regulations in productive ways.
This panel explores different forms of navigating mobility rules and their consequences: active rule breaking as survival strategy; infrapolitical practices of resistance; unexpected outcomes of migration and mobility policies; business of illegal mobility; living outside of state control and its institutions; living in between (and maybe exploiting) various regulation systems; external and intrastate exclusionary rules of mobility; (unwritten) rules towards children, women, old age, race and class mobilities; rules governing mobility documents; rules for welcoming cosmopolitans; absence of mobility rules; rules of access in and out of places; public shared rules and encounters with rule breakers; mobility rule breaking as a matter of identity; etc.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper provides insights into how various facilitators used to enable irregular passages by boat for asylum seekers Australia and analyses the impacts of the criminalisation of people smuggling for both asylum seekers and convicted perpetrators.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides a perspective from the Global South on the facilitation of irregular passages ('people smuggling'). Between 2009 and mid-2013, more than 50,000 asylum seekers made their way to Australia by boat with the help of Indonesian transporters. Their arrival in Australia triggered hyper-politicized debates on migration, refugee protection and national security and led to the adoption of more restrictive deterrence strategies. Pressured by the Australian government, Indonesian authorities adopted a range of policies that served to immobilize asylum seekers aspiring to reach Australia from Indonesia. Indonesia criminalized people smuggling for the first time in 2011, but it has enforced the legislation implemented for this purpose unevenly. Next to discussing the consequences of Australia's and Indonesia's anti-people smuggling policies for asylum seekers and refugees who are now forced to wait indefinitely in order to 'move on', this paper looks closer at who gets punished for his/her involvement in people smuggling? and Who escapes criminal prosecution and why? While there is strong political pressure to combat people smuggling, prosecution and punishment proceed unevenly, targeting poor, precarious and marginalised perpetrators more harshly than those with higher social standing, solid social networks and the means to pay off others. in result, I argue that the “illegality industry” (Andersson 2014), in which certain law enforcement officials and less visible actors of the smuggling networks work together in harmony, was left widely intact.
Paper short abstract:
Using two ethnographies on Africans living in Europe, we discuss how migrants are confronted with different bureaucratic realities along their trajectories. We present EU’s mobility regime as a ‘navigational continuum’, requiring different tactics that create their own norms of good/bad mobility.
Paper long abstract:
“This system, agh, this system makes you feel lost. They ask you for this paper, that paper, you enter this process, but then they say the laws have changed. So after the sea, there comes another sea.”
The above appearance of another sea expresses the frustration of a Cameroonian man regarding the complex and dynamic rules and regulations of Europe’s mobility regime that differentiates and controls different types of ‘movers’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Based on two interrelated ethnographic projects that deal with Africans living in Europe under different legal conditions, this paper presents how migrants are confronted with different bureaucratic realities along their migratory trajectories. In our analysis, we do not only pay attention to formal and written rules, but also to unwritten norms and rules that derive from ‘the system’ and subjectify individuals and groups of migrants. In particular, we present EU’s mobility regime as a ‘navigational continuum’ (Vigh 2006; Schapendonk 2020) whereby at some points in time African migrants do their best efforts to move out, escape, and circumvert the system, whereas in other places/times the same people work towards embeddness, inclusion and visibility. As we will show, these tactics create their own norms of good vs. bad im/mobility.
Paper short abstract:
Many Senegalese young people never represent their trajectories in terms of breaking rules or laws. They think and craft their future as an effort that is already beyond the rules, the models and obstacles inherited from elders, policies and previous generations.
Paper long abstract:
Migration in Africa are often interpreted through the lens of “cultures of migration” or restrictions related to mobility regimes. The first perspective focuses on local mobility patterns and the social transformations they generate. The second, on the other hand, focuses on the obstacles, dangers and forms of immobility caused by migration policies. Based on an ethnographic research conducted in five emigration contexts in Senegal, as part of the MIG-CHOICE project (under Outcome Four of SSSII program for the IOM and FCDO), this paper wants to restart from the point of view of the younger generations on their lived (im)mobility. In recent years, numerous development interventions supported both by international organizations and local authorities have contributed to producing a dichotomous representation of Senegalese youth as inactive subjects or potential/aspiring “irregular” migrants. But if observed closely, many young people, even when they produce aspirations to migrate at any cost, never represent their trajectories in terms of breaking rules or laws. They express projects of mobility and social affirmation by oscillating between daily navigation, ways out of uncertainty and forms of social belonging. They think and craft their future as an effort that is already beyond the rules, the models and obstacles inherited from elders, policies and previous generations. In doing so, they already seem immersed in a future that returns to everyday life to make sense of the choices to stay or leave. A future that their fathers, the rules and legal systems seem to nothing but chase.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses how Gambian migrants in Italy use their experience in the Italian asylum system and the potential for inclusion over belonging generated by its contradictions to re-appropriate the border regime's subjectification, build support networks and pursue their migratory projects.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how Gambian migrants in Italy resist and try to appropriate the policies, technologies, and devices of subjectification of the border regime to pursue their migratory projects. The paper focus in particular on how they use their experience in the Italian asylum system and the grey areas, bureaucratic blind spots, and potential for inclusion over belonging generated by its contradictions. Because of the lack of a pre-existing Gambian diasporic network and the historical conjuncture which co-produced their arrival, the so-called refugee crisis, the asylum system entirely mediated Gambian presence in Italy. The administrative and juridical system largely rejected their request for asylum, leaving them undocumented or in legal limbos. Despite this and the fact that they endure multiple forms of marginalization and racialization in the wake of the growing erosion of asylum rights and the rise of anti-migrant attitudes, many of them found a way to survive, to work, and adapt to life in Italy thanks to the network they developed during their prolonged stay in the asylum system. These networks include compatriots, migrants of other nationalities, and the people who were formerly their “caretakers”: social workers. The paper discusses how Gambian migrants resist and circumnavigate social exclusion and invisibilization by staying in the territory where they were originally placed by the asylum system and by capitalizing on the support network they were able to build. The paper aims to acknowledge and reflect on these forms of solidarity born in the interstices of the humanitarian/securitarian nexus.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents and compares the regimes of mobility, the discussions on the morality/immorality of transnational migration, and the attempts to counter involuntary immobility by navigating the shifting boundaries between rules and morals in two Gambian villages.
Paper long abstract:
Kerewan and Mansajang are two rural communities of The Gambia, located respectively in the North Bank Region and Upper River one. Since colonial times, youths from this part of the country have trod the paths of labour migration, by moving in the 1950s to the Sierra Leonean diamond fields, and then spreading, generation after generation, to other African countries, Europe, and the United States. Geographical mobility has become a strategy of upward social mobility and a way to support the reproduction of rural households, with Europe and the US standing as high-prized destinations by the end of the twentieth century.
In the last twenty years, Kerewan and Mansajang regimes of mobility have clashed with the increasing restriction of immigration policies in the Global North. The ‘backway’, as Gambians familiarly label ‘irregular’ migrations, has been the most visible (and mediatized) result of the friction between internal and external rules of geographical and social mobility. This friction has also triggered local discussions on the morality/immorality of the ‘backway’, the role of the Gambian state in the implementation of EU immigration (and repatriation) policies, and the reintegration of destitute return migrants that challenge consolidated patterns of intergenerational financial and social support. Long-term research in the country, and fresh ethnography carried out in 2020, allow this paper to compare Kerewan and Mansajang’s plural attempts to counter the present age of involuntary immobility by navigating the shifting boundaries between rules and morals in their own terms.