Short Abstract:

The panel invites participants to reflect ethnographically and theoretically on asylum infrastructures to investigate how uncertainty is embedded and materialised across different sites and contexts.

Long Abstract:

From asylum reception and detention centres to boats and border technologies, infrastructures of asylum are both the method and materialisation of a politics of uncertainty. Their routine conceptualisation and design as temporary, makeshift and problem-solving is central in the framing and governance of refuge as a crisis, which engenders the psychosocial conditions of uncertainty and insecurity. They dictate the experience of asylum and refuge in complex processes of subjectivation or interpellation, including who gets recognised as a refugee and how rights are accorded or taken away. Critical anthropological approaches demonstrate that many infrastructures only become visible through their failings. Others have dealt with failure as a systemic feature of infrastructures, especially when systems are deliberately designed to fail, deter or alienate.

Building on these understandings, this panel aims to move attention from failure to uncertainty, as a related but also qualitatively distinct temporal, spatial and social infrastructural element. A focus on uncertainty and/as insecurity allows us to be attentive to more subtle processes of ambivalence, opaque systemic violence, and accountability.

The panel invites participants to reflect ethnographically and theoretically on asylum infrastructures to investigate how uncertainty is embedded and materialised across different sites and contexts. We hope to consider temporal regimes and experiences of infrastructural uncertainty, including issues of waiting, stuckedness, pendulousness and borrowed time. To debate whether such infrastructures can be reimagined, and who gets to reimagine them. And to ask to what extent such infrastructures can be re-shaped by inter-subjective agencies of solidarity, design justice and radical care.