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Border management, cooperation and control in the Baltic Sea area
Border management, cooperation and control in the Baltic Sea area
Sophia Yakhlef
Goran BasicInternational Conference on Migration, Irregularisation and Activism: Challenging Contemporary Border Regimes, Racism and Subordination, The Swedish Forte-network on "Irregular migrants and irregular migration", Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM) at Malmö University and Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden (20160615-20160616). ”Border management, cooperation and control in the Baltic Sea area” (with Sophia Yakhlef), p. 43. Recent events in Europe concerning the large influx of irregular migrants and re-implementation of border controls have drawn our attention towards European migration management and border politics. Border officers claim that they must rely on cooperation to perform their duties of border guarding. In 2014 a collaborative project initiated by the Stockholm County Police, Border Division in Sweden was commenced. The project was partly funded by the European commission. The participants were border police and border authorities in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. This is a qualitative study based on empirically gathered material such as field interviews with border officers and fieldwork observations. This study suggests that the border officers re-negotiate spatial and cultural identities to make cooperation possible creating new distinctions and boundaries of “us and them”. The border officers are united in their views and efforts to protect EU territory and Schengen space from criminal activity but some express ambivalence towards categories of “criminals” concerning irregular migrants. At the same time, cooperation and increased social interaction stimulate the officers to create new categories of “us and them”; those who you know personally trust and those whom you do not know and cannot trust. Earlier distinctions between the east (the former soviet states such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and the west (Sweden and Finland) are in some ways diminished through interaction and close cooperation. Instead, the Baltic Sea officers create distinctions between themselves and southern European countries regarding work methods, general attitude, opinions, and efficiency.
Related Papers
Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination, the 12th European Sociological Association Conference, Institute of Sociology, Prague, Czech Republic, (20150825-20150828). ”Policing Borders through Cooperation in the Baltic Sea Area” (with Sophia Yakhlef), p. 1548. This study focuses on the collaboration project Turnstone that is partly funded by the EU. The project is a joint collaboration among border organizations in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden, aiming at preventing trans-boundary criminality. The abolition of EU internal borders and the implementation of the Schengen regime have entailed intensified efforts of controlling European borders and border crossings. Borders previously guarded by passport controls must now be monitored through border officers relying on international cooperation. The present study focuses on how officers collaborate in their day-to-day management of border guarding, taking into consideration the different social and cultural backgrounds of the project participants. To these ends, this qualitative study is based on empirical material gathered from interviews with, and field observation sessions of officers working at the Baltic Sea border agencies. The preliminary findings suggest that, although collaboration is burdened with bureaucratic difficulties, there is a common understanding of purpose among the project participants. These border officers’ common declared objective is to fight criminality and create a safer Europe. However, the participants, possessing different organizational and cultural backgrounds, have to adapt to and adopt a common language (in officers’ terms EU-English), common schemes of categorizing (inside-outside distinctions), and develop a sense of trust and identity. Collaboration, it is claimed by the informants, is best achieved through getting involved in everyday practices, working side by side, and spending free time together, rather than through following bureaucratic rules and regulations.
15th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology. Criminology as unitas multiplex: Theoretical, epistemological and methodological developments, European Society of Criminology and Faculty of Law, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal (20150902-20150905). ”Collaboration Obstacles and Success: Described and Observed Experiences of Police and Border Guards’ in the Baltic Sea Area” (with Sophia Yakhlef), p. 137. This study analyses the cooperation between police and border guard authorities in the Baltic Sea area and primarily one collaborative project initiated by the Stockholm border police (co-funded by the EU). The purpose of the project is to decrease trans-boundary criminality and improve day-to-day cooperation between police and border officers in the Baltic Sea region. The participants are police and border authorities in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. Earlier research on collaboration shows that cooperation comprises problems and conflicts. The purpose of this study is to map and analyze how the staff of the different organizations experience, understand, and define obstacles of cooperation as well as successful cooperation, and which interactive and discursive patterns are involved in the construction of this phenomenon. The empirical basis for this study are qualitative interviews and field observations of organized intelligence and operational meetings and informal meetings before and after the organized meetings conducted during visits to different organization. This study suggests that the border officers and police re-negotiate spatial and cultural identities to make cooperation possible. Close cooperation and performing mundane work practices together entail an emerging idea of a shared EU border police “culture”. The notion of common northern European identity is described as an important feature for successful cooperation, but at the same time, conflicting views of regional and historical differences between the countries involved are expressed. Despite the alleged cultural differences and similarities, the border officers claim that cooperation between the countries is vital in order to protect EU territory and Schengen space from external threats and criminal activity. When some border officers create a distance from criminals and other professional partners, conflicts can be erased so as to generate new conditions for cooperation. Construction and reconstruction of collaboration obstacles and success is an ongoing, interactive process. Presentation of the proper interaction moral is created and re-created during interactions and appears in the myriad everyday interactions.
Yakhlef , Sophia; Basic, Goran and Åkerström, Malin (2015) ” Protecting European Borders: Changing Border Police Cooperation in the Baltic Sea Area”. Social Studies, 9(3): 5-24. The recent influx of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe has drawn our attention towards the future of Schengen and European border politics. In 2014-2015 a European collaborative project called Turnstone (partly funded by the European commission) was implemented to increase control of European borders in the Baltic Sea area and to diminish trans-boundary criminality. The purpose of the project is also to increase cooperation between border, police and coast guard officers in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. The officers argue that the abolition of internal borders and the implementation of the Schengen regime in the EU has led to increased efforts to control and monitor borderlands and border crossings. The border officers must rely on cooperation to perform their duties of border guarding and hence must change their methods of working. This is a qualitative study based on empirically gathered material such as field interviews and fieldwork observations at the different border agencies. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the staff of the different organizations defines successful collaboration and what collaboration obstacles they have identified during the implementation of the cooperation project. The findings suggest that the border officers re-negotiate spatial and cultural identities to make cooperation possible. The idea of common northern European historical identity is described as important for successful cooperation. At the same time, language and communication difficulties, differences in work practices and national legislation, differences in status and different areas of interest are seen as collaboration obstacles. However, the border officers are united in their views and efforts to protect EU territory and Schengen space from external threat and criminal activity.
Researching Security: Approaches, Concepts and Policies, University St. Kliment Ohridski, Faculty of Security, Skopje, Ohrid, Macedonia (20150602-20150603). ”Researching Security: Collaboration Obstacles and Success in Described and Observed Experiences of Police and Border Guards’ in the Baltic Sea Area” (Keynote Speaker; with Sophia Yakhlef), p. 24-41. This study analyses the cooperation between police and border guard authorities in the Baltic Sea area and primarily one collaborative project initiated by the Stockholm border police (co-funded by the EU). The purpose of the project is to decrease trans-boundary criminality and improve day-to-day cooperation between police and border officers in the Baltic Sea region. The participants are police and border authorities in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. Earlier research on collaboration shows that cooperation comprises problems and conflicts. The purpose of this study is to map and analyze how the staff of the different organizations experience, understand, and define obstacles of cooperation as well as successful cooperation, and which interactive and discursive patterns are involved in the construction of this phenomenon. The empirical basis for this study are qualitative interviews and field observations of organized intelligence and operational meetings and informal meetings before and after the organized meetings conducted during visits to different organization. This study suggests that the border officers and police re-negotiate spatial and cultural identities to make cooperation possible. Close cooperation and performing mundane work practices together entail an emerging idea of a shared EU border police “culture”. The notion of common northern European identity is described as an important feature for successful cooperation, but at the same time, conflicting views of regional and historical differences between the countries involved are expressed. Despite the alleged cultural differences and similarities, the border officers claim that cooperation between the countries is vital in order to protect EU territory and Schengen space from external threats and criminal activity. When some border officers create a distance from criminals and other professional partners, conflicts can be erased so as to generate new conditions for cooperation. Construction and reconstruction of collaboration obstacles and success is an ongoing, interactive process. Presentation of the proper interaction moral is created and re-created during interactions and appears in the myriad everyday interactions.
Interactive borderland? Re-thinking networks and organizations in Europe, Goethe-Institut Riga and the International Research Training Group (IRTG) 'Baltic Borderlands: Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region', Riga, Latvia (20150925-20150926). ”Border Guard Cooperation. Creating Cooperation in the Baltic Sea Area” (with Sophia Yakhlef), pp. 11-13). Project Turnstone is a collaborative project partly funded by the European Commission. The project is an initiative by the Stockholm Police. Collaborating partners in the project are the Swedish Coast Guard; Region Northeast, the Helsinki Police, the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard District, the Police and Border Guard Board in Estonia, the State Border Guard of the Republic of Latvia, and the State Border Guard Service at the Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Lithuania. The aim of this project is to decrease trans-boundary criminality and improve day-today cooperation between border officers in the Baltic Sea region. This study analyses this collaborative project and especially the operative joint activities conducted during the implementation of project Turnstone. What is unique about the Turnstone model of working is the implementation of the operative action week where officers have the chance of exchanging, sharing, and cooperating with immediate action in the same office using their own channels of information. The purpose of the study is to map and analyse how the staff of the different organizations experience, understand, and define successful cooperation and collaboration obstacles encountered during cooperation with neighbouring organizations. The study is qualitative and based on ethnographically gathered material such as field observations at the different border agencies and qualitative interviews. 73 interviews were conducted with border police officers, police officers, border guards, and coast guard officers from the participating organizations. The findings suggest that interviewed officers see Project Turnstone as a rare opportunity for close, personal cooperation where officers can build strong police, border, and coast guard networks and increase and strengthen previous cooperating practices. This is due to colocation and interpersonal interaction where officers can learn about each other’s organizational practices, establish trust, and achieve the same goals. On the other hand, collaboration obstacles were also raised, such as language and communication difficulties, differences in national legislations, and fear that the opportunities for joint action weeks and close cooperation will diminish after the termination of project Turnstone. Despite these obstacles, interviewed officers share a common sense of purpose and motivation and see close interpersonal cooperation as the best way of protecting the EU and Schengen area from criminality in the Baltic Sea area.
Yakhlef, Sophia; Basic, Goran and Åkerström, Malin (2017) “Policing Migration: Described and Observed Cooperation Experiences of Police and Border Guards in the Baltic Sea Area”. Journal of Applied Security Research, 12:1, 117-140, DOI: 10.1080/19361610.2017.1228422. “Collaboration” is generally portrayed as being beneficial to intelligence and operational police work, even if previous collaborative research shows that conflicts are common between authorities who are supposed to cooperate. The present study focuses on how officers collaborate in their day-to-day management of borderguarding, taking into consideration the different social and cultural backgrounds of the project participants. To these ends, this qualitative, ethnographically study is based on empirical material gathered from interviews, field observation sessions with officers working at the Baltic Sea border agencies and documents. The findings suggest that, although collaboration is burdened with bureaucratic difficulties, there is a common understanding of purpose among the project participants. These border officers’ common declared their objective is to fight criminality and createa safer Europe. However, the participants possessing different organizational and cultural backgrounds have to adapt to adopta common language (in officers’ terms EU-English), common schemes of categorizing (inside-outside distinctions), and develop a sense of trust and identity. Collaboration is claimed by the informants, and is best achieved through getting involved ineveryday practices. They worked side by side, and spent free time together rather than following bureaucratic rules and regulations.
(Un)Making Europe: Capitalism, Solidarities, Subjectivities, the 13th European Sociological Association Conference, Hellenic Sociological Society, Athens, Greece; Panteion University of Social & Political Sciences, Athens, Greece and Harokopio University, Athens, Greece, (20170829-20150901). ”(Un)Making Europe: Anomie in Intelligence and Operational Police and Border Guard Work in the Baltic Sea Area”. Available online: https://www.conftool.pro/esa2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=1090 Émile Durkheim’s sociological term ‘anomie,’ which indicates normlessness or a state of norm resolution, is the theme of this ethnographic study. The purpose is to analyze how intelligence and operational personnel in the various border authorities in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania describe the category “Russian criminals” and which discursive patterns cooperate with the construction of the category “norm-dissolving Russian.” Multiple forms of empirical material were analyzed in this study: observations and photographs taken during the field work (718 field hours), interviews (73), documents produced by intelligence and operative personnel, and media coverage concerning intelligence and operative actions. This ethnography explains how police and border guards in the Baltic Sea area reinforce in-group bonds, develop a professional identity, and come to understand the moral aims of their work: by contrasting themselves against the constructed threat of Russian criminals, spies, and military invaders. Intelligence and operational police and border guard work is a practice in which the work from the first moment is characterized by an abstract threat, justified by considering that the stability of society can be transformed into instability if crime is not fought. Police officers and border guards in this study are constructed as key figures in the struggle to prevent the resolution and preserve the current state of society, which is portrayed as stable and better – at least if we speak with intelligence and operative police officers and border guards. From time to time, a “criminal” from Russia has a key role in the performance of law enforcement’s fluctuating morality, with the threat of norm resolution coming from Russia and attenuation of the threat based on the representation of effective law enforcement. The media reporting on intelligence and operations, as well as the documentation that was created by the authorities involved in the fight against crime in the Baltic Sea area, call out the “criminals” from Russia by their absence. The media report on syndicates from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania who commit crimes in Sweden and Finland. In documents created by the intelligence and operational personnel, it is reported that more than 700 individuals had been suspected or convicted of a crime in any of the European countries. Most are citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The picture presented in the interviews is different. Actors in this study produce Russians as the leading criminals in the Baltic region. Russian criminals are represented as organizers and leading figures in various types of crime. An informant’s story is constructing a symbolic reality where law-abiding and conventional actors strive to maintain stability in the normative order, in this case referring to the crime that comes from Russia. This reality is partly an expression of fear and solidarity against norm resolution in the form of crime from Russia, and expressions of social development that raise the need for a contra-group to strengthen feelings of solidarity in the norm-stable societies. The identity-based symbolism that informants are constructing in their stories is based on the current and stable normative state of society.
STONE AGE Studying Technologies of Non-analogous Environments and Glacial Ecosystems Papers in Honor of Jürgen Richter
Leaf points/bifacial tools: symbolic tools, weapons or something else? Some remarks on Moravian (Czech Republic) bifacial tools2024 •
Generally speaking, a bifacial tool is usually understood to be a tool of long use-life with a special function. In comparison with, for example, a side scraper, much more time is needed for the fabrication of a bifacial tool, but the proposed use of these two tools is the same. Some scholars note that a leaf point / bifacial tool represents a tool with high social status, which, on the one hand, is given by the difficulty or skill required in its knapping and, on the other, the possible functional variability of using the tool. The excavation of the Moravský Krumlov IV site with Szeletian artefacts in situ has allowed us to perform various analyses during recent decades and ask ourselves many questions. In the light of the above-mentioned “mainstream theory,” the question arose as to whether a bifacial tool represents only a symbolic tool or something else. In this article, I discuss the role of bifacial tools / leaf points in general and not regarding their specific groups.
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
ACADEMIC
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MIGRATION, IRREGULARISATION AND ACTIVISM CONFERENCE
Workshop Session 1 – June 15th, 13:30 – 15:15
3: Bordering processes
4: Welfare states and labour
markets in transition
5: Postcolonial and
intersectional perspectives
6: Rethinking the politics of
refugee protection
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman
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Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman
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Strand Organisers: Ioanna Tsoni and
Jacob Lind
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling
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Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling
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WS 11 - 15th, 13:30 – 15:15
WS 12 - 15th, 13:30 – 15:15
WS 13 - 15th, 13:30 – 15:15
WS 14 - 15th, 13:30 – 15:15
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WS 16 - 15th, 13:30 – 15:15
Room: B231c
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Chair: Anna Lundberg
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The vitality of borders: Gendered
borderscapes and everyday lives.
Migrant spatial claims against the
trap of Dublin III: challenging the
exclusionary channels of asylum
and citizen politics.
Between borders, behind fences:
detention of children asylum
seekers in Australia and the
European Union.
Differential deportability and access
to education for irregular migrant
children and disenfranchised EUcitizen children in Sweden.
Memorandum for people power:
Migration, precarity and new social
movements in post apartheid south
Africa.
Politics of hospitality from below.
Jana Haeberlein
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Eleonora Del Gaudio and Stephen
Phillips
Jacob Lind and Maria Persdotter
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Serhat Karakayali
Militarization and activism – The
case of Lampedusa.
Asylum rally and no border musical
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Civilised Brutality: (Un)exceptional
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Undocumented children and the
Swedish welfare state. Citizenship
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Colonial amnesia and
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Which Europe, for whom?
Challenging the EU asylum policies
through contested mobilities.
Ilaria Tucci
Pouran Djampour and Emma
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Amanda Schmid-Scott
Maline Holmlund
Mahdis Azarmandi
Elena Fontanari
Critical perspectives of borders,
open borders, and no border.
Performing other (Hi)Stories: Die
Asyl-Monologe repre-sentation of
refugees’ voices in theater.
‘Ships in the Night’ Australian
border security: paradigm,
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of global justice.
Precariously included: Irregular
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Racism experienced and
demonstrated by Chinese-speaking
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Rethinking the politics of refugee
protection: beyond asylum and
neoliberalism.
Harald Bauder
Janis Jirotka
Peter Chambers
Marry-Anne Karlsen
Chia-Ling Yang
Lorenzo Vianelli
Migration, Inc.: Testing the political
act of self-representation.
The movement of undocumented
youth in the United States –
Contesting the anti-migrant
hegemony beyond citizenship and
legislation.
(Il)legalizing fear: Preemptive
deportations at the borders of the
E.U. and U.S.
Portable welfare under the age of
globalization: The comparative case
study of Thai and Nordic welfare
model for immigrant workers 19902010.
The ‘problem’ of refugees – Racism
and activism.
The European Union and the ‘crisisfication’ of human movement.
Mamadou Diop and Leonie
Meester
Helge Schwiertz
Austin Kocher
Sustarum Thammaboosadee
Elizabeth Vasileva
Michael Strange
Migration Inc, 15 min documentary
screening.
‘Fighting against clandestine
migration’: Uncertainty, ambiguity
and political participation in
Morocco.
Detention centres for foreigners in
Spain: Current situation,
achievements and challenges.
Negotiating belonging through
individual assessments: Two cases
of social work practice in Sweden.
Decolonizing the “deportation turn”
– Racial state and mobility control
in Europe and the colonies.
Challenging the politics of
‘protection’: the spatial, temporal
and moral production of
‘refugeeness’ within Europe.
Mamadou Diop and Leonie
Meester
Sebastien Bachelet
Ana Fornés and Patricia Orejudo
Vanna Nordling
Aino Korvensyrjä
Fiorenza Picozza
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
2: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 2
2
1: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 1
MIGRATION, IRREGULARISATION AND ACTIVISM CONFERENCE
Workshop Session 2 – June 15th, 15:45 – 17:30
2: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 2
3: Bordering processes
4: Welfare states and labour
markets in transition
5: Postcolonial and intersectional
perspectives
6: Rethinking the politics of
refugee protection
WS 21 - 15th, 15:45 – 17:30
WS 22 - 15th, 15:45 – 17:30
WS 23 - 15th, 15:45 – 17:30
WS 24 - 15th, 15:45 – 17:30
WS 25 - 15th, 15:45 – 17:30
WS 26 - 15th, 15:45 – 17:30
Room: B231c
Room: C127
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Chair: Anna Lundberg
Chair: Norma Montesino
Chair: Jacob Lind
Chair: Heidi Moksnes
Chair: Klara Öberg
Chair: Lorenzo Vianelli
Tales of waiting and determination: Canada’s Solidarity activism, challenging
controlling measures over family
Refugee Inc. The case of G4S and
reunification immigration and transnational
asylum housing.
spouses’ coping strategies.
The body-border: Governing irregular
migration through biometric technology.
“The undocumented migrant” in
legislation processes.
Honour-based violence, migrant status
and access to justice: Findings from a
study of migrant women living in the
UK.
Whom calls law a refugee? Refugee
definitions and the politics of
denomination.
Karine Geoffrion
John Grayson
Helle Stenum
Mervi Leppäkorpi
Geetanjali Gangoli, Aisha K. Gill and
Natasha Mulvihill
Dana Schmalz
A life in the corridor: Becoming an
‘unaccompanied minor’ in Sweden.
Practices of self-organisation among
migrants in Italy; the case of 4Stelle.
Borders as embodied and affective.
The construction of the figure of the
immigrant and the birth of immigration
laws.
"Women's space is everywhere!":
Border narratives – a study of lived
experiences and political discourse.
Refugees, guests and status decisions:
Are they all the same? Rethinking
refugee protection in Turkey and the
EU.
Cecilie Lanken Verma
Marsida Gjoncaj, Valerio Muscella
and Paolo Palermo
Leila Whitley
Andrew Crosby
Marie Witt Gad Johansen, Silje
Garnås Kristiansen & Ida Gunge
Funda Ustek-Spilda
‘Migrant illegality’: Controlling and
navigating borders in the city of Marseille.
Activism beyond movement: New
spaces, new forms, new
subjectivities.
Making space desirable – Border regions as
multistable figures.
Enacting migrants, minorities and the
nation: On the double social life of
statistical categories.
At the borders of gender:
Deconstructing the boundaries of
gender as a feminist political category
to engage the governing of immigration
in contemporary Italy.
The (non)researched attributes of
refugee identity and their role in
(un)successful integration.
Christine M Jacobsen
Isabel Meier
Lynn Musiol
Francisca van Gromme and Stephan
Scheel
Stefania Donzelli
Kristýna Tamchynová
Moving populations and emancipatory
spatial practices in Greece’s crisis-scapes.
‘‘Nous sommes ici! We are here!’:
irregular migrants’ urban struggles
for belonging and urban citizenship
in Brussels.
The construction of the citizenship of young
refugees: A policy analysis and
ethnographic study in Belgium.
The intercultural double absence of the
migrant. Good will and desire for
control.
Making feminist arguments and
strategies against borders and
regulated migration.
To whom should we grant asylum?
Vasiliki Makrygianni
Afra Dekie
Lesley Hustinx and Rachel Waerniers
Felix Bender
Walter Stefano Baroni
Disa Helander
Permanence pending: How Chinese
temporary migrants hope to stay in the UK
through relationships with permanent
residents.
Monitoring ethnic diversity: A Latin
American experience in the UK.
Feminist fieldwork and migration
control: Reflections from the migrant
route through Mexico.
Hiu Yan Yu
R. Rodriguez Pau
Sara Alemir
Additional WS 27 - 16th, 14.15 – 16.00: Förvaret (The Detention Center), Film Screening, Room D337 – Chair: Minja Niemi
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
3
1: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 1
MIGRATION, IRREGULARISATION AND ACTIVISM CONFERENCE
Workshop session 3 – June 16th, 11:15-13:00
3: Bordering processes
4: Welfare states and labour
markets in transition
5: Postcolonial and
intersectional perspectives
6: Rethinking the politics of
refugee protection
WS 31 - 16th, 11:15 – 13:00
WS 32 - 16th, 11:15 – 13:00
WS 33 - 16th, 11:15 – 13:00
WS 34 - 16th, 11:15 – 13:00
WS 35 - 16th, 11:15 – 13:00
WS 36 - 16th, 11:15 – 13:00
Room: B231c
Room: C127
Room: C233
Room: C231
Room: D222
Room: D328
Chair: Pouran Djampour
Chair: Carin Cuadra
Chair: Austin Kocher
Chair: Eva Wikström
Chair: Heidi Moksnes
Chair: Funda Ustek
Traces of dissensus: Resisting
immigration raids in London.
School outside these four walls:
Contesting irregularization through
alternatives to education.
Border management, cooperation
and control in the Baltic Sea area.
Migrant vulnerability in the interAmerican and European human
rights systems.
Discursive debate on Iranian
LGBTQs’ right in the European
media.
Protection despite Dublin.
Johannes Balthasar Oertli and Kiri Tanya Aberman and Philip
Santer
Ackerman
Goran Basic and Sophia Yakhlef
Carolina Furusho
Zeynab Alsadat Peyghambarzadeh
David Lorenz
Migration management in Berlin:
Emergency centers and struggles
against them.
Activism as career of Indonesian
return migrant workers.
"Fortress Europe"? The role of
Frontex in the European political
discourse.
The global politics of human rights:
Who cares about Eritrean migrants?
Being "the other other" –Racialised
LGBTQ-people and European
migration.
Tracing UNHCR’s transformation into
an agency of forced migration
management through the emergence
of new figures of protection.
Žiga Podgornik-Jakil
Akuat Supriyanto and Carlos
Cabral-Cardoso
Bahar Mahzari
Sadia Hassanen and Hauwa
Mahdi
Katharina Kehl
Philipp Ratfisch and Stephan
Scheel
“We are actively integrating
ourselves into the struggle”:
Detainee activism and the
contestation of migration
enforcement “from below”.
“The facts by those who bear them”:
scholarly activism and ‘theorypraxis unity’ in the framework of
anthropological migration research.
Extra-territorial jurisdiction:
critiquing the European Union's
complicity with external border
control policy on the
Moroccan/Spanish frontier.
Emigration from Western Balkan
countries – an empirical analysis.
Victimisation, xenophobia and
welfare chauvinism in Scandinavia:
The case of Norway.
A journey towards Protection: Syrian
refugees between war and borders.
Leah Montange
Sofia Vlachou
Holly Saunders
Visar Malaj and Stefano de
Rubertis
Mette Wiggen
Maissaa Almustafa
Contesting the Dublin Regulation:
Refugees claim ‘hereness’ and
personhood in Germany.
Integration against the will of the
state: The struggles of deportable
immigrants for regularisation in the
UK.
Europeanisation of families?
Marriages of convenience and EU
free movement law.
Employment by labour market
intermediaries: Prospects and
problems.
Sámi feminisms – Nation, selfdetermination and decolonization.
International human rights treaties
versus bilateral agreements:
Implications for refugees and
illegalized immigrants.
Fazila Bhimji
Reinhard Schweitzer
Aleksandra Jolkina
Johanna Schenner
Ina Knobblock
Hallee Caron
Living liminality. Ethnological
insights on the life situation of nondeportable migrants in Malta.
Criminalised labour, criminalised
life? Excesses and contradictions in
sanctions against undocumented
migrant workers.
A journalistic space of
contestation: The crime myth of
Sweden’s Chicago.
Refugees’ protection and refugees’
mobility, an irremediable oxymoron?
Sarah Nimführ
Niklas Selberg
Leandro Schclarek Mulinari
Scalettaris Giulia
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
2: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 2
4
1: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 1
MIGRATION, IRREGULARISATION AND ACTIVISM CONFERENCE
Workshop session 4 – June 16th, 14:15-16:00
2: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 2
3: Bordering processes
4: Welfare states and labour
markets in transition
5: Postcolonial and
intersectional perspectives
6: Rethinking the politics of
refugee protection
WS 41 - 16th, 14:15 – 16:00
WS 42 - 16th, 14:15 – 16:00
WS 43 - 16th, 14:15 – 16:00
WS 44 - 16th, 14:15 – 16:00
WS 45 - 16th, 14:15 – 16:00
WS 46 - 16th, 14:15 – 16:00
Room: B231c
Chair: Minja Niemi
Room: C127
Chair: Carin Cuadra
Room: C233
Chair: Martin Bak Jörgensen
Room: C231
Chair: Maria Persdotter
Room: D222
Chair: Chia-Ling Yang
Room: D328
Chair: Fiorenza Picozza
Book workshop: "Solidarity without
borders: Gramscian perspectives on
migration and civil society
alliances".
Articulations of racialisation and the
continuum of deportability.
Migration political changes in
Sweden 2015/2016.
The role of migrant agency in the
processes of political socialization:
the case of the Turkish student
return migrants from Germany.
Home, agency and power – social
reality of Polish refugee camps.
4stelle Film screening
Irregular migrants on the labor
market: Networks for information
and protection.
Martin Bak Jörgensen and Susi
Meret
Maja Sager and Klara Öberg
Seda Aydin
Marta Kluszczyńska and
Aleksandra Reczuch
Wanted – A discourse analysis of
seven migrants’ experiences of
working without a permit in Sweden.
Irregularisation of migrants and
informalisation of work from a
Swedish perspective.
Imagining the other: the symbolic
construction of ‘illegal migrants’
among documented Mexican
migrants in Sweden.
Degrees of "Europeaness" on the
Aegean Turkish-Greek border.
Johanna Övling
Anders Neergaard
Guillermo Merelo
Aila Spathopoulou
Chinese migrant sex workers
mobilization in Paris. From
invisibility to collective action.
Irregular migrant domestic workers
in Hong Kong SAR.
The border and partitioned
identities.
A forgotten voice: Refugee
narratives within an emerging
European public sphere.
Hélène Le Bail
Gabriela Marti
Animesh Baidya
Muhamed Amin
Trade Union centers for
undocumented migrant workers in
Germany and Austria as results of
migratory struggles.
Making workers illegal sojourners:
The case of France.
A posthumanist microethnography of The refugee crisis in Lesvos and/as
disaster capitalism?
multiculture – Olfactory
assemblages in Rome’s Banglatown.
Michel Jungwirth and Holger
Wilcke
Caroline Caplan and Dumitru
Speranta
Elisa Fiore
Marsida Gjoncaj, Valerio Muscella Heidi Moksnes
and Paolo Palermo
5
Anja Karlsson Franck and Ioanna
Tsoni
Representing immigrant workers or
immigrant residents? Studying the
legitimacy dilemma of an immigrant
organization in Los Angeles.
Asylum seekers’ journey through a
(changing) Europe. In theory and in
practice.
Davide Gnes
Anna Klitgaard and Nicol
Savinetti
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
1: Contestations: Activism and
everyday resistance 1
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
KEYNOTE SPEECHES
BRIDGET ANDERSON
TITLE: The European crisis facing
migrants: Racism, slavery, and the right
to locomotion
ABSTRACT: In this paper I will examine, not
the migration crisis facing Europe but the
European crisis facing migrants. I’ll begin by
analysing how migrants at the border are being
represented in press coverage and what this
reveals about the anxieties underpinning
public and policy responses to immigration. I’ll
then look at attempts to render the
institutional response to those at the borders
compatible with Europe as a space of respect
for human rights, and illustrate that this has
meant a) the resurgence of the refugee/
economic migrant distinction and b) the
depiction of migrants as victims of slave
traders and traffickers. I will argue that if we
are looking for continuities with the slave
trade we should look to the right of locomotion
which was demanded by slaves, and which is
precisely what European states are denying. I
will end by emphasing the importance of
forging new political connections between
migrants and citizens.
BIOGRAPHY: Bridget Anderson is Professor of
Migration and Citizenship and Research
Director at COMPAS.
6
She has a DPhil in Sociology and previous
training in Philosophy and Modern Languages.
She is the author of Us and Them? The
Dangerous Politics of Immigration
Controls (Oxford University Press, 2013)
and Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics
of Domestic Labour (Zed Books, 2000). She
co-edited Who Needs Migrant Workers?
Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public
Policy with Martin Ruhs (Oxford University
Press, 2010 and 2012) The Social, Political and
Historical Contours of Deportation with
Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti
(Springer, 2013), and Migration and Care
Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics with Isabel
Shutes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Bridget
has explored the tension between labour
market flexibilities and citizenship rights, and
pioneered an understanding of the functions of
immigration in key labour market sectors. Her
interest in labour demand has meant an
engagement with debates about trafficking and
modern day slavery, which in turn led to an
interest in state enforcement and deportation,
and in the ways immigration controls
increasingly impact on citizens as well as on
migrants. Bridget has worked closely with
migrants’ organisations, trades unions and
legal practitioners at local, national and
international level.
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
MERCEDES JIMÉNEZ
TITLE: Border regimes, child mobility
human rights and believes in networking and
community work as key factors in social
transformation.
and academic activism.
LIZ FEKETE
ABSTRACT: The border is not a physical
TITLE: Between hospitality and violence:
fence. Borders are spaces of non-rights and
affect everyone, whether moving or not,
whether migrating or not. Beginning with the
process of creating Europe’s southern border
and its externalization to the southern and
eastern Mediterranean, I am going to talk
about how borders reduce rights legislatively,
executively, technologically and ideologically.
The narrative thread running through this
analysis is the mobility of adolescents who are
moving ‘alone’, violating these borders and
calling child protection parameters into
question. The response to these new forms of
mobility must be constructed collectively,
based on transversality and transnationalism
and go beyond classic social work responses
that are limited to a single region. From the
position of academic activism, I propose new
forms of social interventionism that
incorporate the effective defence of human
rights and the protection of children who are
moving in inopportune ways.
Migration, racism and the current refugee
migration to Europe.
ABSTRACT: In today’s Europe nationalism is
resurgent and refugees and migrants are on
the front line. In her keynote speech, Liz
Fekete will offer an exposé of the development
of civic voluntary engagement and activist
responses around Europe on the one hand, and
argue that Europa is facing a moral crisis on
the other hand. Over the Summer, a European
community of civilian volunteers appeared,
seemingly from nowhere. All part of the
largest transnational humanitarian
collaboration in Europe's history. At the same
time, politicians across Europe engaged in a
reckless and dehumanising anti-migration
rhetoric. Never was there more need to
establish peace, not war, at Europe’s borders.
BIOGRAPHY: Mercedes G. Jiménez has a
doctorate in Social Anthropology and is an
expert in migration, borders and human rights.
She has lived and worked between Tangier
(Morocco) and Andalusia (Spain) for 15 years.
Her professional work has been dedicated to
development cooperation (decentralized,
multilateral, bilateral and NGDOs) and
university education in Spain, Portugal and
Morocco.
As a researcher, she has focused on analysing
cross-border mobility processes, migrant
children and youth, the ways in which the
European migration regime has crystallized,
and coloniality processes and development
cooperation. She has done research in Mexico
and Brazil, is a member of several research
groups and has a number of publications to her
name. As a woman, activist and researcher,
she is dedicated to the active defence of
7
BIOGRAPHY: Liz Fekete is Director of
the Institute of Race Relations where she has
worked for the last thirty years, and head of its
European research programme. She writes and
speaks extensively on aspects of contemporary
racism, refugee rights, far-right extremism and
Islamophobia across Europe and is author
of ‘A suitable enemy: racism, migration and
Islamophobia in Europe’.
Liz has been an expert witness at the Basso
Permanent People’s Tribunal on asylum, the
World Tribunal on Iraq and in 2013 gave the
second annual Malmö Freedom Lecture . Her
most recent publications include: ‘Alternative
Voices on Integration in Europe’ (which
foregrounds the work of youth groups and
innovative anti-racist projects whose initiatives
are largely ignored by the mainstream)
and ‘Pedlars of Hate: the violent impact of the
European far Right’.
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
PARALLEL
WORKSHOPS 1
WEDNESDAY JUNE 15TH // 13:30 – 15:15
WS 11: CONTESTATIONS: ACTIVISM AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE #1
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman & Pouran Djampour
Chair: Anna Lundberg
Location: Room B231c
The vitality of borders: Gendered borderscapes and everyday lives.
Jana Haeberlein (University of Neuchatel)
Migration control implies bordering practices that are always interrelated and occur at various
levels and in different sites where they are being enacted as well as contested. In this way, the
border equally manifests itself territorially as well as socially and culturally (Donnan 2015). Thus,
bordering practices and their contestations may also be found in social and cultural spaces such
as refugee support groups in a city scape. The project that this paper is developed from focuses on
the border as a site of potential exclusion of people trying to enter Swiss territory. It investigates,
how specifically the processes of migration control are carried out at the border; it asks how the
practices of territorial border control are reflected in the bordering practices and their
contestations in social and cultural spaces in a cityscape; and the project focuses on the
experiences and perceptions of the border of different actors involved. The social spaces
comprise fairly newly established local projects that support the well-being of asylum seekers and
sans-papiers through everyday practices like joint cooking and dinners, doing sports, gardening,
socializing, film screenings, etc. The aim of researching these social spaces is to grasp the
everyday experiences and minor politics of contesting bordering practices by the asylum seekers
and sans-papiers (and their supporters) that participate in these projects in Basel, Switzerland.
The narratives and observations of the participating migrants are analysed vis-à-vis participant
observation of the migration controls and formal bordering practices of the Swiss Border Guard
in this borderscape. One of the main questions I wish to discuss here is how the practices in the
social spaces are differently gendered compared to the often masculinist bordering practices of
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the Swiss Border Guard. In what ways do gender, migration control, different power relations,
bordering practices and resistance to them intersect?
Militarization and activism – The case of Lampedusa.
Ilaria Tucci (University of Tampere, TAPRI)
This paper focuses on the ongoing militarization process in Lampedusa, and on the local
collective Askavusa’s activities. In fact, Askavusa has been recently leading a strenuous battle
against the militarization of the island and especially against the radiations that the island
receives constantly from military and civil radars. The Askavusa’s battle, contrasting the global
neoliberal policy, discourse governance, the centralized decision-making processes and
governance, which do not take into consideration the local needs and voices, exemplifies how
conflicts occur at glocal level. I consider that the conflict in which Askavusa is involved – the
demilitarization of the Island and specifically the uninstallation of radars – represents a glocal
conflict as well as Askavusa embodies a glocal movement of activism and resistance. I analyse
how the collective Askavusa has perceived the changes on the island in terms of time and space
in relation to the militarization process, and how their activism is developing. Data of this
research are my observation during the fieldtrip that I have done in Lampedusa in October 2015
and the material that I have gathered about Askavusa and the militarization of the island (blog
articles, videos, interviews, academic and scientific articles).
Critical perspectives of borders, open borders, and no border.
Harald Bauder (Ryerson University)
It is now widely accepted that borders are no longer at the border line but manifest themselves
along transit routes, in workplaces, and in the everyday. In this presentation, I problematize the
border concept and critically explore open-borders and no-border ideas as conditions of
possibility. My exploration builds on existing literatures of borders, open borders, and no border
as well as citizenship and territorial belonging, and engages a critical theory perspective drawing
on Ernst Bloch’s work on utopia and the possible. I illustrate my argument through examples
drawn from activism related to the sanctuary-city and no-border movements. While open-borders
and no-border narratives serve as powerful negation of contemporary border practices, the
possibility of free human mobility would either require the reconfiguration of existing citizenship
principles and practices or more substantive structural transformations. I conclude that the
notions of open borders and no border operate at different layers of the utopian possibilities of
mobility and belonging.
Migration, Inc.: Testing the political act of self-representation.
Mamadou Diop (Migration Inc.)
Leonie Meester (Migration Inc.)
Mainstream media have a powerful grip on the presentation of the influx of irregular migrants
from Asia and Africa into Europe that we are currently experiencing. The popular European
imaginary is saturated with viewpoints of migration as posing a problem, threat or burden to our
European societies. Migrants have largely been the narrated objects of communication rather
than being active participants within popular discourses. Where communication equals power
(Castells, 2009), self- representation becomes a political act (Canevacci, 2013). The Athens9
MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
based collaborative Migration, Inc. aims to encourage and facilitate self-representation -the
development of “voice” and agency- of irregular migrants within popular discourses on migration
by stimulating self-narration through documentary making and blogging as well as the
organisation of public discussions locally. We have recently released and our now showing our
first co-created documentary. How do these migrants in Athens choose to shape their subjective
migration experiences? Which conflicts arise, and how does the public respond? This case study
functions as a reflection on our first experiences
Migration Inc, – 15 min documentary screening.
Mamadou Diop (Migration Inc.)
Leonie Meester (Migration Inc.)
WS 12: CONTESTATIONS: ACTIVISM AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE #2
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman & Pouran Djampour
Chair: Norma Montesino
Location: Room C127
Migrant spatial claims against the trap of Dublin III: challenging the exclusionary channels
of asylum and citizen politics.
Martina Tazzioli (University Aix-Marseille)
In this presentation I will focus on migrant struggles in Italy against Dublin III Regulation and on
their refusal to be fingerprinted in Italy claiming the right to choose the place to live in Europe.
Many of the migrants protesting against Dublin III regulation are Eritreans, and therefore are in
principle considered by the EU as people “in real need of protection” and who can be potentially
relocated in other European countries. Yet, Eritrean migrants raised a claim that cannot be
supported or contained within the existing legal framework, carrying on a radical political
demand: freedom of choice – choice of the place for living. While national authorities present
their struggle as a refusal to be identified, actually migrants engage against the “spatial trap” of
Dublin III regulation and against the asylum procedure that would stop them in Italy. The
presentation will tackle these migrant radical spatial claims from two main angles. The first one
is their excess in relation to any existing legal framework, due to their demand that goes beyond
the access to asylum claim and that is about the freedom to choose where living and moving. The
second one concerns the relationship between visibility and temporality of migrant struggles that
tends to be overlooked in political analyses.
Asylum rally and no border musical – The making of political agency.
Pouran Djampour (Malmö University)
Emma Söderman (Lund University)
By taking departure from the work of the No Border Musical and the Asylum Rally, based in
Malmö in the south of Sweden, the purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of political
agency. Having in common making visible and questioning migration policies, the Asylum Rally
and the musical are constituted of people with and without legal status. The musical was founded
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in 2011 and has since then worked with writing a manuscript, shaping the ensemble and
performing in the cities of Malmö, Stockholm and Norrköping. The Asylum Rally started its work
of organizing in the beginning of 2013 and in the following summer the 34 days long march from
Malmö to Stockholm was carried out. The aims of both organisations can be understood as
making visible the consequences of migration control in contrast to the otherwise dominant
discourse of refugees and undocumented persons as apolitical, universal victims in desperate
need of help, entirely separated from the political, social and historical context within which they
exist. In this paper we ask ourselves what these two organisations can teach us about political
agency. The question that has guided this paper is: How can political agency be made possible in
a society where citizenship is seen as a prerequisite for political participation? By interviewing
and participating, underpinned by an activist oriented method, we conclude that perceptions of
who can be a political agent are dynamic and constantly subject to challenges. Our findings show
that to perform and be acknowledged as a political agent is not static and fixed but rather a redefinable and transformable process. We are also reminded that even if undocumented persons
have constituted themselves as political agents, given the temporality and fluidity of political
agency, they are still subject to deportation.
Performing other (Hi)Stories: Die Asyl-Monologe representation of refugees’ voices in
theater.
Janis Jirotka (Humboldt University, Kurt-Löwenstein Jugendbildungsstätte)
‘Performing other (hi)stories’ has several dimensions of meaning. Positioned outside of the
national narrative and historiography, migrants’ and refugees’ histories are rendered invisible if
they are not attached to a national framework of belonging. At the same time, the individual who
is marked as the refugee, becomes the Other, the culturally unsuitable and the hyper-visible
foreign. Of course, these life stories take place, even if they are ‘invisible’ to the public eye of an
as homogenous imagined community. Performing other (hi)stories can also mean a disruption of
established discourses, the act of speaking out, publicly and on stage, in a bid to claim cultural
self-representation holds a deep political connotation. The actors we see on stage performing
monologues of asylum are no refugees. They, as part of the citizen-nation-state construct, are
performing other stories. The refugees’ voices are transported through the bodies of the
performers. Questions of identification, representation, ownership and moral responsibility arise
through the performance of someone else’s narrative. However, reflecting on the refugee in a
transit position rather than as a life in status quo, can help us understand why it is important that
the individuals concerned are able to move on with their lives. In times of a so-called 'refugee
crisis' theaters all over Germany have started to initiate theater projects with and about refugees
and offer a stage to issues of asylum. This thesis deals specifically with the prevalent issues of
representation and questions of ‘who speaks for whom?’. While also looking at the formation of
“radical collaborations” (Bhimji) which are formed between theater makers and refugee activists
and which hegemonic spaces struggles for representation are carried into.
The movement of undocumented youth in the United States – Contesting the anti-migrant
hegemony beyond citizenship and legislation.
Helge Schwiertz (University of Osnabrück, IMIS)
The movement of undocumented migrant youth in the United States that has emerged over the
last 15 years challenges the illegalization of migrants as well as the strategies of the broader
immigrant rights movement. Especially in California, political groups are currently going beyond
a focus on citizenship and legislation. Instead, they are fighting directly against the enforcement
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of immigration policies and the deportation and detention regime. This paper analyzes their fight
for equal rights that goes beyond a mere claim for the status of US-Citizenship, but that can be
perceived as an enactment of civil and human rights. While “legalization” is a principal demand
for established migrant rights organizations in the US, groups like the Immigrant Youth Coalition
(IYC) in California are questioning its importance. Many do not think that they have to become
US-citizens, rather they fight for their rights as actual residents: defending their communities
against deportations and fighting for driver licenses, health care and work permits. They criticize
citizenship status because of its racist and sexist limitations and its exclusion of future migrants –
symbolized in the slogan “with or without papers – we will always be illegal”. Nevertheless, they
emerge as activist citizens (Isin 2009) in the process of rights claiming. Especially their public
“coming out of the shadows” actions can be read as performative practices, in which they not
only render their undocumented status visible, but also produce their political subjectivity as
undocumented migrants. In this paper, I draw upon my research with the undocumented
migrant youth movement in California, where I conducted document analysis, participant
observations and qualitative interviews. Referring to approaches of critical citizenship studies
and radical democracy, I argue that these undocumented youth radically challenge the
deprivation of rights they face in the anti-migrant hegemony.
‘Fighting against clandestine migration’: Uncertainty, ambiguity and political participation
in Morocco.
Sebastien Bachelet (University of Edinburgh)
Drawing on fieldwork amongst irregular, sub-Saharan migrants living in Morocco, this paper
examines issues of uncertainty and ambiguity in relation to migrants’ political demands. It
contributes to current debates over illegalization, b/ordering processes and migrants’ active
participation in re-defining what it means ‘to be political’. Recent studies of citizenship, often
inspired by the autonomy of migration perspective, have exposed and decentered boundaries
between the citizen and the illegal migrant, thereby placing a prominent focus on migrants’
subjectivity and the radical potential of migrants’ protests. However, I argue that it is crucial not
to limit an examination of migrants’ protests to a ‘host’ state and also account for their wider
range of claims. In examining the birth and development of an irregular migrants’ organisation
set up in Rabat ‘to fight against clandestine migration’, I illustrate how studies of migrants’
political engagement need to pay attention to issues of ambiguity and uncertainty to explore how
migrants navigate the political realm.
WS 13: BORDERING PROCESSES
Strand Organisers: Jacob Lind & Ioanna Tsoni
Chair: Ioanna Tsoni
Location: Room C233
Between borders, behind fences: detention of children asylum seekers in Australia and the
European Union.
Eleonora Del Gaudio (Åbo Akademi University)
Stephen Phillips (Åbo Akademi University)
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The widespread use of detention of asylum seekers as a form of border control is an
acknowledged reality which carries a particular significance in cases where children are involved.
Many studies provide evidence of the detrimental impact of detention, especially when those
measures affect particularly vulnerable persons. The present study is a comparative inquiry on
the detention of children asylum seekers in Australia and the European Union (EU). The two
realities examined display significant differences, yet many commonalities can also be traced in
the growingly restrictive approach to migration being favoured by many states. The right to
liberty in the asylum context and the protection needs of children are addressed from a legal and
practical perspective. Notwithstanding the existence of important legal guarantees, the practice
of detaining asylum seeker children deserves adequate scrutiny owing to their particularly
vulnerable position. Detention plays a central role in policies of deterrence and in promoting
notions of strong borders. States have shown an increased willingness to pursue coercive policies
in efforts to control access to their land and sea borders. States have the right to control entry to
their territories, but they are also under legally binding obligations to ensure that all border
control measures, including the detention of children asylum seekers, comply with international
human rights law. Hence, this analysis questions the logic lying behind the capacity of states to
detain children due to their migration status and identifies relevant protection gaps within the
Australian and EU spheres.
Civilised Brutality: (Un)exceptional violence inside immigration detention centres.
Amanda Schmid-Scott (University of Exeter)
As Slavoj Žižek states in the opening lines of his essay, 'The Tyrant’s Bloody Robe', if there is a
unifying thesis that runs through the bric-a-brac of reflections on violence, it is that within
violence there lies a paradox; he states that once we step back and disentangle ourselves from the
lure of equating violence with acts of crime and terror, directly visible, and performed by a
clearly identifiable agent, we are able to observe what he defines as ‘systemic violence’, the
invisible ‘dark-matter’, the catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic
and political systems (Žižek 2009: 1). This paper brings together the ways in which violence can
be understood, not simply the ‘physical carnage that can tear up the body’ (Norstrom 2004: 60);
systemic violence possesses the quality of the unexceptional and the banal, terrible in its ability to
create political inertia and hierarchies of domination and submission. I argue that immigration
detention and its everyday administrative systems, techniques and disciplinary procedures serve
to placate and disempower those under them, through a form of systemic violence which I call
‘civilised brutality’ - those processes which invisibly yet strategically cause an ‘unmaking’
(Bosworth 2013) of certain bodies over time. From the disorientation and disconnection caused
by arbitrarily moving detainees from one centre to another, to the routine handing out of
paracetamol tablets for any and every complaint or condition, these techniques interact within
detention centres to render life governable and pliant. They are in themselves, a mundane,
routinised form of violence, both disguised by and embedded within regulatory systems and
protocols.
‘Ships in the Night’ Australian border security: paradigm, normative order, and negated
vision of global justice.
Peter Chambers (Deakin Univesity)
This paper examines Australian border security as a paradigmatic case, with the hope of opening
dialogues as aspects of the Australian ‘solution’ emigrate back to Europe. I draw particular
attention to Australia’s vanguard use of total offshore detention, that is: a situation in which no
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asylum seekers are able to arrive by boat, and in which all who try to do so are permanently
excluded from ‘onshore’ Australia. The Australian case is conspicuous as a fully enacted fantasy
and a replicable policy model. Australian border security relies on offshore, a two-sided form that
excludes things by including others. I look at the form of offshore as the basis for the
development of a number of differential mechanisms for the integration of class domination in
the age of finance capital, and examine their spread through Anglophone political formations –
beyond finance into detention. Read as form, offshore is as much about empty luxury apartments
in the heart of London as it is about children in indefinite detention on Nauru. Seen as agentic
empirical processes, offshoring discloses border security as a normative order that sees borders as
screened space, secured circulation and strategic national asset. The placement of such a
normative order at the heart of a vibrant multicultural Commonwealth raises questions of actual
complicity within and beyond the Australian polity. The active promotion and export of aspects
of the Australian model back to Europe raises questions of global complicity and possible justice:
if border security’s separations are our relations, what is fair, what are we responsible for? How
are we to live together in our cities with offshore detention not just ‘out there’, but also among
us, between us, in us?
(Il)legalizing fear: Preemptive deportations at the borders of the E.U. and U.S.
Austin Kocher (The Ohio State University)
In this paper, I argue that the division between legimate and illegimitate migration is being
replaced by a logic of “preemptive deportation”. In the past three years, unprecedented numbers
of migrants fled systemic violence in home countries and sought refuge in the United States and
Europe. These migrants typically expect to receive political protections under international
asylum law based on their experience of sustained violence and civil war. Yet when asylum
seekers arrive at the borders of the U.S. and the E.U., they face borders that are increasingly
militarized and restrictive despite nominal commitments by these countries to international
human rights law. At both the U.S.-Mexico border (historically) and now at the E.U.-Turkey
border, developed countries are creating new legal programs which ostensibly offer migrants an
opportunity to claim asylum, but which, in practice, serve to justify the deportation of hundreds
of thousands of asylum seekers. I call this new strategy “preemptive deportation”, and I suggest
that the legal justification for preemptive deportation hinges upon a new legal epistemology of
fear that is remaking international asylum law. I elaborate on the everyday legal geographies of
preemptive deportation and the legal epistemologies of fear through my experience working with
migrants in family detention along the U.S.-Mexico border, and extend these conclusions to the
recent E.U.-Turkey agreement designed to prevent migrants from reaching Europe. As a result of
this work, I conclude that these borders are becoming legal grey zones where migrants are
offered highly attenuated forms of legal protections in order to satisfy the absolute minimum
expectations of ostensibly benevolent, liberal states, while at the same time deporting migrants
prematurely as a part of a program to restrict in-migration as a result of widespread anxieties
about racial, religious, and population-level change in the developed world.
Detention centres for foreigners in Spain: Current situation, achievements and
challenges.
Ana Fornés (Campaña estatal por el cierre de los CIE)
Patricia Orejudo (Campaña estatal por el cierre de los CIE)
Since Detention Centres for Foreigners (DCF) were settled in Spain in 1985, the detained
persons have suffered a systematic violation of their most basic human rights, among which the
rights to privacy, identity, education, family life, access to justice, health and even life. The first
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part of this paper (I: “Past and current situation of the DCF”) is dedicated to illustrate about the
dreadful situation of the DCF in Spain, which has been possible, to a great extent, thanks to the
calculated opacity with which these centres have been directed by the Police. Nobody knew what
happened there. For a very long time, the DCF were even deprived of judicial supervision. In the
last years, though, the silence has been broken thanks to many different factors. The second part
of the paper analyses the role of activism in the origin and development of such factors (II:
“Achievements”). The third and last part of the paper (III: “Challenges”) is dedicated to disclose
the paths that should be explored in order to close up these places, as the only means for fully
guaranteeing human rights. To this end, two elements are taken into consideration. First, the real
aim and meaning of DCF as one of the pieces of immigration policies; and second, the European
dimension of such policies, which oblige to strengthen the European level of activism.
WS 14: WELFARE STATES AND LABOUR MARKETS IN TRANSITION
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Klara Öberg
Location: Room C231
Differential deportability and access to education for irregular migrant children and
disenfranchised EU-citizen children in Sweden.
Jacob Lind (Malmö University)
Maria Persdotter (Malmö University)
This article critically examines the right to education for irregular migrant children vis-à-vis
disenfranchised EU-citizen children in present day Sweden, and calls into question why the
former categorisation of children is allowed access to education while the latter is not. Based on a
discourse analysis of relevant government reports and statements, the article compares how
irregular migrant children and so-called ’children of vulnerable EU-citizens’ are portrayed in
public policy discourses. The article argues that although the decision to extend the right to
education to irregular migrant children hinged on a definition of this particular right as a
universal right, it nevertheless was, and remains, contingent upon the children’s potential
deportability. In one key governmental report it is argued that since there are no effective
controls on migration within the EU, a decision to allow ‘the children of vulnerable EU-citizens’
unrestricted access to education could provide an incentive for parents to uproot their children,
and might result in an overburdening of the Swedish education and welfare systems. Instead the
report proposed that social rights like education should be withheld from these children in order
to stem the migration of poor and racialised EU-citizens to Sweden. We argue that the
deportability and near-total exclusion of irregular migrant children from the status of citizenship
allows and enables their inclusion in the social dimensions of this citizenship. In
contradistinction, poor and racialised EU-citizen children who have a less precarious legal status
and are significantly less deportable are, for this precise reason, excluded from accessing
education and other social services. Ultimately, this paradox is an expression of how various
notions of children and children’s rights are mobilised in the governance of migrations into and
within the European Union.
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Undocumented children and the Swedish welfare state. Citizenship and child protection in
times of globalization.
Maline Holmlund (Linköping University)
In my dissertation I would like to investigate how the Swedish social welfare system construct
notions of citizenship in relation to the case of undocumented children. I will be conducting
interviews with local politicians, social workers and NGO representatives in two different
municipalities. These have been chosen in regards to criteria such as political colour and past
record in relation to undocumented children. My studies will be conducted in municipalities that
have had very different approaches towards undocumented children. While the first has granted
full social benefits to undocumented families with children, the latter has become known for not
wanting to accept unaccompanied children and conducting political meetings against accepting
them in the municipality. I will be looking at how various local welfare state representatives view
their responsibility for this group and how they understand this group in terms of rights to
welfare and rights to space in the Swedish society. I will be looking at how social workers talk
about this category in relation to “problems” and “solutions” and how they relate their own
responsibility to national legislation and NGO:s. By doing this I hope to shed light on how
notions of citizenship and inclusion/exclusion within the nation state are constructed at a local
level.
Precariously included: Irregular migrants, welfare and labour protection
Marry-Anne Karlsen (Uni Research Rokkansenteret / IMER Bergen)
In this paper, I propose the concept of precarious inclusion as an attempt to move conceptually
beyond binary conceptualisations of legal status and portrayals of irregular migrants as simply
excluded by drawing attention to the complex interplay between irregular migrants’ political
exclusion and the limited and substandard protection of their basic needs in European welfare
states. In Norway for example, irregular migrants are excluded from the nation-state and from
mainstream welfare arrangements such as the National Insurance Scheme, yet compensatory
measures caring for their biological life are still implemented with various degrees of formality.
These services are of a subordinate, arbitrary, and unstable kind, and access to them are
constantly undercut by the migrants’ formal exclusion. Precarious inclusion is in this sense a
concept that draws attention to how inclusive measures, although well-intended, can contribute
to constructing migrants’ precarity. In this paper, I will situate the concept of precarious
inclusion in relation to other comparable concepts used in the field and discuss how the concept
can be used to explore irregularized migrants blurry positionality as both included and excluded
in relation to welfare and labour protection.
Portable welfare under the age of globalization: The comparative case study of Thai and
Nordic welfare model for immigrant workers 1990-2010.
Sustarum Thammaboosadee (Thammasat University)
The presentation is the reflection of an ongoing research project which focused on the possible
model of welfare protection for migrant workers in Thailand.According to the demand of
competitive low cost to meet the requirement of global supply chain; it seems difficult to
introduce welfare protection even for local workers. Somehow,the consecutive class struggle
from civil society since 1990’s generate the ambitious policy which is hard to imagine for lowincome economy like Thailand. The social security act was introduced for the first time in 1993
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and became the first formal welfare protection for non-bureaucratic workers in Thailand.
Following decade, the universal health care protection had been introduced which covered all
Thai citizens under the standard health care provision with only 1USD levy service per time.
Though the welfare revolution in two decades is welcomed by civil society but many observers
suggest that it may become late revolution. According to the rise of Neoliberalism which Thai
state plays the significant part as primary product producers; foot loose factory, migrant workers,
globalizing financial sector had shaped the different scenario of labor power. The temporary
migrant work force drastically increase since the turning of centuries. They work in an overexploited condition. Even though the attempts of legalize process for illegal migrant workers is
able to integrate migrant workers for normal welfare protection. The new problem is that most of
migrant workers are young adult who are relatively less require for welfare provision and are
likely to work for temporary basis. However, once they migrate their aging or unable to work
bodies back home.The studies attempt to project the possible portable welfare model for migrant
workers by the experience from economic history of welfare development.
Negotiating belonging through individual assessments: Two cases of social work practice
in Sweden.
Vanna Nordling (Lund University)
In studies of irregular migration, it has been noticed that the borders permeate social policy and
everyday welfare practices. These processes are contested not least by migrants themselves, and
in some cases undocumented migrants do access services that are otherwise entitled residents.
This study takes a closer look at two cases where ambiguities surrounding social rights and
undocumented migrants become visible. Through interviews and document studies, social work
practice is studied as one of the sometimes porous borders of the Swedish welfare state. At a
policy level, the Swedish social services have not addressed undocumented migrants explicitly,
but the Social Services Act does state that the municipalities have a responsibility for everyone
residing at their territory. Malmö municipality deviates from other municipalities' citizenship
practices in that it addresses undocumented migrants in a more far reaching way. This has given
undocumented formal access to social rights, even if the right is to be assessed individually. At
the everyday level, some social workers stretch and/or cross their professional boundaries in their
encounters with unaccompanied minors risking deportation. The social workers sometimes go
beyond what they formally are supposed to do and choose to act outside of their professional
mandate. The new relationships and the spaces for acting outside of the professional mandate are
however not entirely private, as they originate within a professional relation and are performed
along with civil society protests. Both cases show that inclusion of undocumented migrants
through social work practice is conditional and partial, but at the same time that the
understanding of who is entitled to social rights is fluid. Individual assessments, regulated to a
different extent, in both cases decide the actual access to the social services. This opens up for
arbitrary decisions, but also for renegotiations of belonging.
WS 15: POSTCOLONIAL AND INTERSECTIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Erika Sigvardsdotter
Location: Room D222
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Memorandum for people power: Migration, precarity and new social movements in post
apartheid south Africa.
Carl-Ulrik Schierup (Linköping University)
The paper discusses issues of migration, precarity and social movements among South Africa’s
poor. It sets off from a vision of ‘people power’ as embodied in the Freedom Charter of the antiapartheid movement, which continues to serve as an important memorandum for the South
African left. It relates a continued reproduction of poverty, hyper-exploitation and unfree labour
in South Africa’s political economy to a rampant extractionism driven by shifting race class
alliances and the constitution and reconstitution of political hegemony under shifting historicalstructural conditions. On this background the author charts the development of South Africa’s
migratory system from apartheid’s centrally managed migrant labour regime to a post-apartheid
neoliberal regime marked by a rhizomatic ‘flexploitation’ of irregular migrants. The article goes
on to discuss the continuous harassment directed against black, largely undocumented, cross
border migrants from sub-Saharan Africa by members of a poor native black precariat, squeezed
between informal practices of labour force management and the commodification of social
welfare and provision of public services. This enigma of ‘xenophobia’, pitting poor ‘natives’
against poor ‘aliens’, is related to wider issues of nation and citizenship in politics for retaining
and remaking political hegemony in an exceedingly unequal society, with an ‘insurgent
citizenship’ driven by a multifarious ‘uncivil society’ of ‘the poors’ beyond the reach of neoliberal
governance. This is matched by a discussion of options for a reconstituted counter-hegemonic
South African left to build a renaissance of people power at a junction where migration
management, combatting xenophobia and winning the loyalty of an unruly precariat in multiethnic townships and an informalised world of labour have become increasingly crucial
stratagems.
Colonial amnesia and discontinuities in Spanish anti-racist discourse.
Mahdis Azarmandi (University of Otago, National Centre for Peace and Conflict
Studies)
While there has been an increase in both border violence towards migrants as well as an increase
on the limitations of rights for migrants within the country, this is only a culmination of racist
practices that have long existed in Spain. Discourses on racism in Spain continue to be heavily
centered on the recent rise in (im)migration and hence situate racism as a problem that targets
migrants rather than racialized minorities per se. As such anti-racist organization approach antiracism from different understandings of what constitutes race in the Spanish context. This paper
looks at current anti-racist groups in Spain and resistance to racism through an analysis of
whiteness and colonial amnesia. Colonial amnesia is one strategy through which white ignorance
maintains white hegemony. Yet, colonial amnesia is also present where groups and organizations
are challenging and fighting racism. In order to understand the politics of exclusion and death,
currently most visible with the so-called border crisis, racism has to be unpacked in its
historicity. Hence, this paper claims that the violence of racism is connected to the violence of
social forgetting and demonstrates how anti-racism without decolonization might in fact reproduce violence.
Racism experienced and demonstrated by Chinese-speaking migrants in Sweden.
Chia-Ling Yang (National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan)
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Sweden introduced a new immigration policy in 2008 that encourages labour immigration from
countries outside EU. After the immigration policy reform, the largest numbers of migrants
comes from Thailand, India, and China. This article is part of a research project on migrants from
India and China in Sweden, with a specific focus on the group of Chinese-speaking migrants in
Sweden. Based on in-depth interviews of Chinese-speaking migrants from Taiwan and China,
this article aims to explore racism that these migrants experience in their processes of migration
as well as racism that they demonstrate against other migrant groups in Sweden. With a close
analysis of these migrants’ narratives and experiences, this article intends to explore the
intersection of elitism and racism in the othering processes among migrants in Sweden.
Although these Chinese-migrants experience different kinds of racism in their daily lives, they
actively employ their class position, 'good-citizen' discourse, and Islamophobic discourse to
demonstrate their 'willingness to become one of "us"' and deservingness in Sweden. I argue that
by exposing the linkage between processes of othering among migrants and racist discourses in
Sweden, we can understand the limit of certain resistance against racism among migrants and try
to find alternatives to combat racism in Swedish society.
The ‘problem’ of refugees – Racism and activism.
Elizabeth Vasileva (Loughborough University)
The end of 2015 has been marked by a new wave of immigration towards the West, and a new
wave of disturbing news headlines – the attacks in Cologne, Denmark’ and Sweden’s new border
controls, nationalist sentiments in Poland, a Hungarian journalist kicking a refugee, French
police tear-gassing fifteen hundred people in Calais. Fortress Europe has reached unprecedented
highs of animosity. The main purpose of this paper is to trace a map of how materialist analysis
can forge revolutionary trajectories without relying on loaded identity-names and categories.
Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s work, it is possible to construct a strong defence of
particularities against universalization and representation – the alternative to which can lead to
new subjectivities being subsumed under the capitalist machine. The problems of assimilation
and the co-opting of refugee crises is a real and pressing concern, but one that is easily lost in the
immediate desperation of fighting to keep people alive and safe. To quote Rosi Braidotti, it is not
enough to dethrone the White Man, but “what is needed is for the newcomers to be able, and to
be entitled, to redefine the rules of the game so as to make a difference and make that difference
felt concretely”. What the role of analysis and activist academics might be in this is a question
that should be under constant discussion. Drawing on my personal experiences as an activist and
as an academic who sees no dividing line between the two, the core of this paper is a discussion
of the types of practices that would allow for a variety of anti-racist, feminist and anti-capitalist
struggles to emerge in the climate of renewed nationalism we see in Europe. This analysis,
stemming from a strong materialist foundation, does not rely on essentialist understanding of
identities, but instead focuses on affinity, solidarity and affirmation.
Decolonizing the “deportation turn” – Racial state and mobility control in Europe and the
colonies.
Aino Korvensyrjä (University of Helsinki)
What kind of genealogies of European mobility controls can serve the struggles against the
intensification of deportations today? How can we conceptualize and interrupt the racism and
coloniality inherent in the current European border regime? Recent Anglo-American scholarship
refers to a “deportation turn” since the 1990s in Western liberal democracies. The remarkably
few historically oriented studies in this literature mostly omit the colonial experience. This paper
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takes the colonial time-space as a starting point to sketch out an archaeology of the current
European border regime. During the formal colonial empire in Africa legal segregation aimed to
immobilize the “natives” while enabling free circulation of Europeans. In the context of the EU
border regime since the 1990's, are “European Apartheid” and “recolonization of migration”
(Balibar) mere metaphors? I will discuss the example of German colonialism. By putting the
colony in to the center I aim to unsettle basic concepts of critical migration research such as
‘citizen”, ‘alien’ and ‘borders’ as elements in a certain racial imaginary, the Westphalian narrative
of the nation state (Grovogui, Koskenniemi, Anghie). I also propose to recognize the vital
importance of knowledge generated in struggles against (colonial) racism. Critical academic
knowledge production or scholar-activism are unthinkable without these struggles and/or
without encounters, exchanges and alliances with actors and groups initiating them. I will
discuss analyses developed in German self-organized refugee networks and feminisms of colour.
WS 16: RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF REFUGEE PROTECTION
Strand Organisers: Stephan Scheel & Martina Tazzioli
Chair: Francisca Gromme
Location: Room D328
Politics of hospitality from below.
Serhat Karakayali (BIM, Humboldt University)
It is often emphasized that the act of opening the German borders by the end of August 2015 was
a political decision of chancellor Merkel against the a bipartisan consensus - the „raison d’etat“ of migration policy in Germany. What is underestimated in such an account is the role of civil
society and grassroots organizations in support of refugees which became increasingly important
over the last few years. When Merkel famously decided that „we can do this“, the paper argues,
this was possible because of the growing number of volunteers throughout German society. Based
on the results of a study conducted among volunteers who support refugees in different places in
Germany, encompassing both individual volunteers and representatives of organisations, the
paper will argue that supporting the cause of refugees has become socially acceptable within the
last few years. The data was collected in November 2014 and again in November 2015, after what
has been largely coined the „refugee crisis“. The number of respondants, which rose from 450 in
the first survey to more than 2200 in the second allows both to provide insights in the
transformation and composition of the field and the blurry boundaries between political activism
and volunteering. With regard to some of the more signficant data, the paper will also explore the
role of the volunteer movement in challenging the European migration regime, the role of second
and third generations migrants and the framing of migration politics in these movements.
Which Europe, for whom? Challenging the EU asylum policies through contested mobilities.
Elena Fontanari (University of Milan)
Rethinking the politics of refugee protection is an urgent challenge that involve the image and
definition of “Europe” that we have. Here I would like to highlights the effects on the migrant
subjects biographies produced by the contradictory EU policies of asylum that mix securitarian
and humanitarian devices. Specifically, I will focus on the im/mobility regime and how the
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migrant subjects with a temporary refugee protection develop everyday practices in order to
overcome, brake and turn around to the EU internal borders. Drawn on 20 months of fieldwork
in Milan and Berlin using multi-sited ethnography, my work investigates the everyday
experiences of a group of migrant subjects that escaped the Libya war in 2011 and landed in Italy,
where they obtained humanitarian protection. Afterwards, because of difficult living condition
such as homelessness and unemployment, some of them decided to move further heading north
Europe, although they were not allowed under EU asylum policies. They reach Berlin, where they
gave rise to a two year protest occupying Oranienplatz and claiming their right to freely move
and decide where to live. After the failure of the political agreement with the local authorities,
the protagonists of my research decide to live anyway in Berlin, despite their new “illegal”
condition, moving back and forth between Italy and Germany in order to renew their Italian
documents. The contested mobilities between the geographical and juridical borders of my
research protagonists shed light on the tensions between the European border regime and the
turbulent attempts to freely move enacted by the migrant subjects. It highlights the detachment
between the EU asylum policies and the heterogeneity of the social reality that build Europe from
below. The biographies of my research protagonists challenged the Dublin convention and
Schengen agreement, which show even stronger signs of crisis today.
Rethinking the politics of refugee protection: beyond asylum and neoliberalism.
Lorenzo Vianelli (University of Warwick)
The paper reflects on the current crisis of protection in the European Union (EU) in order to
develop alternative ways for conceptualising protection. Drawing from fieldwork in Italy and
Sweden, it discusses two issues that mark the EU politics of protection: access to protection and
type of protection. The access to protection is increasingly obstructed and limited. These
restrictions highlight once again the exclusionary nature of asylum, which functions as a
mechanism of differentiation between deserving and undeserving. The type of protection is more
and more ineffective despite the rights written on paper. Such ineffectiveness draws our
attention to the subjectivities prescribed for those protected and depicts protection as a
technique of government primarily intended to manage and discipline. The paper argues that
these issues results in promoting the differential inclusion of migrants in EU societies. As a
result, the EU politics of protection sits within a wider project of migration management which is
informed by neoliberal imperatives and therefore undermines the very idea of protection. In
conclusion, the paper suggests that rethinking the politics of protection should entail both the
rejection of the distinction between forced and economic migration and a radical critique of
capitalist social relations.
The European Union and the ‘crisis-fication’ of human movement.
Michael Strange (Malmö University)
This presentation outlines a new research project focused on the central question: “Does the
supposed refugee crisis threaten the project of European integration, or might the need for
transnational coordination serve to strengthen the European Union?” The motivation to engage
in this project is that what is currently described as either the ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee crisis’ poses a
number of puzzles for understanding both politics and society within Europe today: First, a
paradox has emerged within the heart of the EU project, around the cosmopolitan notion of
hospitality (Strange and Lundberg 2014). Cosmopolitan hospitality has been at the centre of
European integration and yet, in the context of the flow of migrants from North Africa and the
Middle East the EU polity has increasingly focused on restricting, as well as segregating, access to
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hospitality within its borders. This is particularly notable where several EU Member-states are
advocating for the exclusion of another EU Member-state – Greece – from Schengen. Second,
whilst the crisis-fication of human movement into Europe clearly challenges the project of
European integration, the ability of individual Member-states to manage migration is also
dependent on strong EU-level coordination. Sweden’s paradigm shift from being relatively open
to refugees to having now securitised migration – most apparent in controls over the Öresund
bridge with Denmark – has been explained as a response to the apparent ‘failure’ of European
states to take their own ‘fair share’ of migrants. This suggests a severe failure of EU coordination,
yet it also implies that the EU is necessary to protect individual Member-states from migratory
pressure. In this situation, the EU’s apparent ‘crisis’ over human migration might not actually
constitute a crisis for European integration but, rather, the reverse.
Challenging the politics of ‘protection’: the spatial, temporal and moral production of
‘refugeeness’ within Europe.
Fiorenza Picozza (King's College London)
This paper looks at the entanglement of asylum and illegal migration in Europe, focusing on the
way the European border regime actively produces refugees rather than receiving them, most
notably through the foreclosing of any other opportunity of legal migration for a great part of the
world’s population. The paper seeks to challenge the idea of a politics of ‘protection’, by
interrogating three crucial dimensions of asylum in Europe: its spatiality, temporality and
morality. First, I interrogate the European legal geographies of asylum, which through
agreements such as the Dublin regulation have produced a condition of hypermobility within
Europe rather than offering 'safe haven'; secondly I look at the temporal framework
underpinning the conceptualization of asylum, and at the way temporality is deployed as a
mechanism of power over refugees, mostly in the form of waiting and of sudden disruptions
(such as deportations and Dublin returns). Finally I look at the moral dimension of asylum, and
at the way a politics of compassion or victimhood reasserts a politics of otherness. Each of these
three dimensions contributes in different ways to a precarious machinery, which ultimately
renders refugees illegalised disposable labour, catering to the needs of the European economy.
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PARALLEL
WORKSHOPS 2
WEDNESDAY JUNE 15TH // 15:45 – 17:30
WS 21: CONTESTATIONS: ACTIVISM AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE #1
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman & Pouran Djampour
Chair: Anna Lundberg
Location: Room B231c
Tales of waiting and determination: Canada’s controlling measures over family
reunification immigration and transnational spouses’ coping strategies.
Karine Geoffrion (Université de Montréal)
In the current context of (cumbersome) family reunification immigration procedures in Canada
and ever increasing delays in the processing of “foreign” spouses’ files, this paper explores the
strategies Canadian women married to non-Canadian men have developed in order to “make it”
through the Canadian family reunification process despite the tactics exerted by the state to deter
such unions. It draws on the conjugal trajectories of thirty Canadian women who are or have
been in an intimate relationship with a non-Canadian man living in a “non-western” country,
focusing on their experience of the family reunification process. Eight months of participant
observation in two online communities of Canadian women married to or sponsoring the
immigration of a non-Canadian man further enrich the discussion. I argue that the immigration
of their spouse to Canada becomes, for the women, a personal and emotionally loaded project to
be achieved by all means. First, I explore some of the strategies the women develop in order to
see their partner “in the flesh” as often as possible, becoming experts on visa applications and on
ways of bypassing international mobility restrictions. Second, I discuss how online women
support networks facilitate the immigration process itself by providing concrete immigration
tips, emotional guidance and an emotional outlet. Finally, I contend that the period of time
where partners live apart due to length of immigration procedures also generates (inter)cultural
learning and negotiation between the transnational partners. This newfound interest in the
society and culture of the loved one is often fertile ground for the burgeoning of a local form of
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intercultural activism on the part of the women, whereby many women keep on advocating for
cultural open-mindedness long after their husband has settled in Canada.
A life in the corridor: Becoming an ‘unaccompanied minor’ in Sweden.
Cecilie Lanken Verma (Global Refugee Studies, Aalborg University)
This paper is an investigation into the lives, experiences and futures of a group of
‘unaccompanied’ young boys in Sweden. The aim of the research is to follow a group of boys for
the duration of three years in order to approach the much-debated phenomenon of
‘unaccompanied minors’ in the Swedish context and seek a deeper understanding of the
subjective and temporal dimensions of their experiences through the asylum ‘corridor’ and
beyond. While the metaphor of a ‘corridor’ is evoked to grasp the transitory spatial and temporal
dimensions of subjectification and belonging in the asylum process, the paper addresses the
underlying structures of temporality and subjectification that inform the reception of
‘unaccompanied minors’ and how they in turn experience and manoeuvre within these structures
through different phases of asylum seeking and the time after its conclusion.
Migrant illegality’: Controlling and navigating borders in the city of Marseille.
Christine M. Jacobsen (Centre for Women's and Gender Research, University of
Bergen)
The consequences of militarized borders and deaths related to illegalized migration have recently
received much public attention in Europe. As Etienne Balibar (2003) noted more than ten years
ago, however, borders are no longer (if they ever were) situated entirely at the outer limit of
territories. Rather, the movement of bodies is controlled and governed through complex
bordering practices, bringing together a number of agents, objects and technologies – creating
shifting landscapes or borderscapes wherever the movement of information, people, and things is
taking place and is controlled. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates
how borders materialize (and dissipate) as migrants ‘navigate’ the city of Marseille. The analytical
optic of navigation (Vigh 2009) points to the mobility of bodies as well as of the borders
controlling and governing bodily movement. Paying particular attention to gender and sexuality
as crucial dimensions of bordering practices and their embodied consequences, the paper argues
that the analytical optic of ‘navigation’ may provide different understandings of agency, bodies
and borders than the ones underpinning both securitizing and humanitarian forms of governance
of 'undesirable' migrants in Europe.
Moving populations and emancipatory spatial practices in Greece’s crisis-scapes.
Vasiliki Makrygianni (Aristotle University)
This paper aims to enlighten spaces of solidarity, emancipation, struggle and resistance that
emerge in Greece’s crisis scapes due to the constant arrival, settlement and departure of
migratory populations. While border areas constitute porous passages for capital goods, labor
market and its components, they also function as spaces of exclusion for certain populations. The
intensifying securitization of border controls, the restrictive migration politics and the
consequent racialized spaces in the cities produce a nexus of death-scapes in the Greek territory.
Nevertheless, both urban areas and borderlines do not act only as places of global economy and
power but also as places of encounter and emancipation. Following an intersectional approach,
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migrants and their spaces of reference are considered not as an homogenous category but as a
derivative of race, gender, class, ethnic or sex relations and differentiations. Moreover in a
decolonial perspective these human streams are not seen as victims of a TINA situation but as
active agents that produce their own ‘heterotopias’. Furthermore, by considering space as a
derivative of social relations, spatial analysis allows us to destabilize fixed categories and dipoles
and brings to light dynamics and potentialities hidden in urban and regional spaces. Through a
multiscalar analysis, the paper indicates how the everyday practices at the local level of the
Athenian urban fabric interact with the formation of inter-local and global networks between
cities, regions and border areas. Paradigms deriving from field research in Athens and in
borderline areas (Lesvos, Idomeni) focus on spatial emancipatory practices that derive from
encounters and conflicts. Thus, it is shown that these human streams create a nexus of emerging
spaces of resistance and emancipation that come in direct opposition with the dominion policies
and allow us to imagine geographies of resistance instead of fear.
Permanence pending: How Chinese temporary migrants hope to stay in the UK through
relationships with permanent residents.
Hiu Yan Yu (University of Edinburgh)
This study aims to investigate the ways in which some young, highly educated, lower-middle class
Chinese “would-be-permanent migrants” in the UK hope to lengthen their stay and obtain higher
flexibility in their chosen place of residence. They seek to explore the possibilities and constraints
of achieving the goal on a daily basis by taking such steps as looking for sponsored-visa
employment, or forming an intimate relationship with a permanent resident. This study looks
into why the formation of a relationship with a British or EU partner is still considered as the
most promising way for Chinese temporary migrants to stay in the UK for as long as they like,
even though they possess adequate cultural and economic capital. The study also examines how
migrants’ lives are affected during the limited time remaining on their temporary visa by the
need to conduct careful planning and calculation. It also analyses how everyday forms of sexual
exchange through romantic and more instrumental relationships with British permanent
residents, and the complex emotions associated with this, greatly shape and constitute their
experiences. In addition, this research aims to provide a counter-narrative to previous studies of
sexual exploitation discourse under the framework of transnational migration, which focuses on
the victimhood of migrants. In contrast, I hope to address the sexual agency of Chinese migrants,
and to study how sex and “love” are used as strategic tool to achieve the means to an end. I argue
that the “manipulation” of sexual relationships is very often situational without being limited to
sex workers or those from a lower socio-economic background, and should be understood within
the webs of gender-and-ethnic based inequality; power imbalance; and social class difference in
the context of Chinese migrants and their partners in the UK.
WS 22: CONTESTATIONS: ACTIVISM AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE #2
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman & Pouran Djampour
Chair: Norma Montesino
Location: Room C127
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Solidarity activism, challenging Refugee Inc. The case of G4S and asylum housing.
John Grayson (SYMAAG - South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group)
EU ‘reception’ policies for asylum seekers and refugees are currently in total chaos with widely
differing national public policies on asylum and migration. In Northern Europe reception and
detention centres and refugee housing are outsourced by national governments to international
companies,private security companies and corporations, creating an asylum market and
secondary asylum markets for what has been described as the European Migrant Industrial
Complex. The UK offers a timely case study as historically the first EU country to outsource
immigration detention centres and asylum housing or ‘low security accommodation’. The paper
describes solidarity campaigning and knowledge production alongside asylum housing tenants in
G4S properties in the Yorkshire and North East regions of England,from 2011 to the present.It
reflects on the campaign which has challenged the largest private security company in the world
through independent media,Westminster parliamentary inquiries,demos and actions - and the
courage of asylum housing tenants.
Practices of self-organisation among migrants in Italy; The case of 4Stelle.
Marsida Gjoncaj (Lund University)
Valerio Muscella (4Stelle)
Paolo Palermo (4Stelle)
The paper we would like to propose takes its impetus from the story of 4Stelle, an occupied hotel
on the outskirts of Rome inhabited by a self-organised community of more than 200 families
hailing from over 20 different nations. The occupants have given life to a multicultural
experiment: the attempt to live together, overcoming cultural and linguistic differences. By
looking at the 4Stelle case, our paper aims to shed light into practices of self-organisation among
migrants in Italy: how does a community who lack resources mobilize collectively to claim their
right to housing; what are the opportunities offered to this community and how do they make use
of them? More broadly the paper is concerned with the experiences of ordinary people
(grassroots level) and their contentious politics. It also seeks to explore the development of such
movements and processes associated with it. In exploring the determinants and modes of
migrant mobilizations, this paper builds on theories of social movements of the passage from
individual suffering to collective action. The everyday life of 4Stelle inhabitants is captured on a
web-doc (www.4stellehotel.it), which the co-directors (Valerio Muscella e Paolo Palermo) would
be happy to discuss at the conference.
Activism beyond movement: New spaces, new forms, new subjectivities.
Isabel Meier (University of East London)
Spaces of activism have always been conceptualised as private in the sense of everyday activism
(Chatteron, 2007; Martin, Hanson & Fontaine, 2007) or implicit activism (Horton & Kraftl,
2009) and/or public as “grandiose, iconic events”. However, recent events around migrant
activism show that mobilisation also occurs in spaces neither public nor, strictly speaking, private
such as detention centres. Consequently, along with new spaces, a new form of activism emerges:
immobile activism. While mobile activism made a first appearance in academic and public debate
following the migrant protest marches in France, Germany and Sweden in 2013 and 2014,
comparatively little attention has been paid to immobile forms of activism and its epistemological
consequences. This is due to the fact that subjects of social movement studies are supposedly free
to move. Beginning analysis and engagement from exceptional spaces of activism such as
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detention centres, I will argue that immobile activism challenges the foundational precepts
central to the sociology of social movements relating to mobility, political subjectivity and space
and new spaces, new forms and new subjectivities of activism emerge. This project attempts to
make a contribution to the emerging critique of a too narrow conceptualisation of activism by
examining spaces, subjectivities and mobility that fall outside of what epistemologically comes to
be called activism. Activism at “the systemic edge” (Sassen, 2015) emerges within particular
contexts that define to a large extent the repertoire of visibility, space, subjectivity and mobility
available.
‘‘Nous sommes ici! We are here!’: irregular migrants’ urban struggles for belonging and
urban citizenship in Brussels.
Afra Dekie (Independent pre-doc researcher; Activist)
For irregular migrants, their everyday lives in the city are strongly shaped by experiences of urban
exclusion, in visible ways (when denied access to particular urban spaces following surveillance
and control) and in invisible ways (when socially and politically excluded from the city). These
in/visible borders in the city are not only shaped by (urban) local, but also by national and
transnational border regimes and migration policies and politics. Nonetheless, border regimes
are also strongly challenged by irregular migrants, particularly when the city (or specific urban
localities) become a site for contesting, negotiating and articulating belonging and urban
citizenship. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork, focuses on the urban struggles of
irregular migrants in Brussels. When mobilizing, irregular migrants in Brussels often formulate
their claims through spatial practices such as marches, demonstrations, and the occupation of
buildings in the inner city. Although mostly revolving around claims for obtaining a legal
residence status, these mobilizations equally express claims for “a right to the city” as well as the
reframing of citizenship regimes, based instead on the presence and residence of irregular
migrants within the city (suggesting a politics of the inhabitant, Purcell). In this way, irregular
migrants have gained increasing visibility in the urban public sphere (their actions have been
largely tolerated by authorities). Yet, in the past months, challenges for mobilizing have arisen
from changing local, national, and transnational border regimes and migration policies and
politics, including the “refugee crisis” of 2015 (which has shifted political attention away from
regularization towards asylum policies), the politicization (and partly criminalization) of the
nearby “refugee camps” in Calais and Dunkirk, the militarization of Brussels following the
November 2015 Paris attacks, and internal conflicts obstructing collective action
WS 23: BORDERING PROCESSES
Strand Organisers: Jacob Lind & Ioanna Tsoni
Chair: Jacob Lind
Location: Room C233
The body-border: Governing irregular migration through biometric technology.
Helle Stenum (Roskilde University)
Biometric identifiers (finger prints, iris scans etc.) have increasingly become a key element in
technology of EU border and migration management, and this development takes place against a
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backdrop of a booming biometric industry preoccupied with technical solutions on government
technology such as national ID, passports and ‘mobility-access-devices’. Furthermore soft
biometrics such as ‘facial recognition’ is promoted now by the industry-community of migration
management as less regulated, less intrusive, fast and flexible. Soft Biometrics, focussing on
height, skin and hair colour, clothes, and any other characteristic that distinguish one person
from all others, is described as the way forward in separating the wanted from the unwanted
migrants at the border and on the territory. This paper discuss both recent technological
developments as well as biometric technology in a historical context and explore the apparent
biometric divide between citizens and migrants, the latter positioned and managed
technologically as risks through surveillance and storage of data, whereas citizens are managed as
holders of access to privileges. The technique however of both circuits is using bodily coded
information emphasizes the general tendency of ‘securitization of identity’ (Rose 1999, 2000).
Focus in this particular kind of governmental technology is the technified ’gaze of the governor’
(Rose 1999), tracking and scanning through enormous amounts of data to identify the specific,
bodily difference that singles you out as object for surveillance and control, and at the same time
subjectifying the human being as container of a physical, essential and unique identity. Essential
identities are constructed in the fabric of the biometric systems as materialised social
categorizations of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, migrant-status etc.
Borders as embodied and affective.
Leila Whitley (University of Konstanz)
This paper explores the ways that an understanding of borders as related to racialised
embodiment is central to understanding contemporary practices of bordering. In border theory,
the implementation of borders has increasingly come to be understood as existing at least as
much ‘inside’ of the space of the nation as ‘outside’ of it. In the context of Europe the location of
borders has been queried following the integration of the Schengen zone. In this space, formal
borders at the territorial limits of nations have been dissolved, but bordering practices continue
to appear in force throughout and beyond national space, leading scholars to describe European
borders as ‘deterritorialised.’ Simultaneously, in the very different political context of the US,
new tactics in immigration policing, such as the use of so-called ‘attrition through enforcement’
legislation that seeks to multiply immigration sites throughout the space of everyday life, also
raise questions about the location of the border. Drawing on both of these sites, in this paper I
ask what the movement of borders to the space of everyday life can tell us about the structure of
borders, and about both what and where they are. I argue that understanding the ways borders
address embodied populations differentially, so that some bodies move freely while other bodies
are threatened by borders when they try to move, is crucial to understanding borders more
broadly. I also argue that in addition to being understood as bodily, borders must be understood
in relation to the life conditions they generate and their affective effects. If some bodies are read
as not belonging, and their presence constantly put into question, then part of what this paper
will explore is the way that bodily vulnerability to the implementation of the border generates
affects that are essential to the border’s work: to reaffirming the ease of presence of some while
maintaining others in a state of uncertainty and precarity.
“It is a racial profiling that is neither reasonable nor lawful…it is racism”: Racialized
(b)order-making in Sweden.
Sarah Philipson (Lund University)
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Uppsala University)
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The political imperative of the ‘civic integrationist turn’ in the ‘making of citizens’, inadvertently
excludes undesirable individuals and ethnic collectives, while also regulating threatening and
monitoring them through disciplinary regimes and different forms of immobilisation such as
border management and internal identity controls (Khosravi 2011). These political processes, we
would argue, contribute to the racialized making of the ‘stranger’ in one central way: the
practices of ‘internal foreigner controls’ constructs citizenship as normatively reserved for the
white Swedish subject, where ‘color bars’ are projected onto non-white bodies, thus constructing
them as a threat to the ‘purity of the white nation’. This contributes to the construction of some
bodies as citizens, quasi citizens or as non-citizens bodies. We explore this through the narratives
of police officers, who in a sense convert politics into practice through the implementation of
state policy (Ekman 1999). Engaging with interviews is thus a way to emphasise the negotiations
of the police practices that construes, denies and configures the identity of the Swede in the
enactment of ‘internal foreigner controls’, and thus simultaneously constructs the foreigner. The
actions of the police acquire legitimacy through the politically sanctioned construction of the
‘foreigner’ that has been apparent in political debates and public statements the last couple of
years. As such, we examine the fragility of citizenship, and interrogate the negotiations inherent
in police practices in the discrepancy of border practices and between those seen as ‘belonging’
and those projected as ‘deviant’. Our argument will be exemplified through an analysis of
political debates in Swedish news media and in-depth qualitative interviews with police officers
(as state functionaries). Theoretically we draw on postcolonial and critical race theory, and
empirically engage with discourse analysis and content analysis.
Making space desirable – Border regions as multistable figures.
Lynn Musiol (Hamburg University)
The decision of the Hungarian government to close its border to Serbia and to erect a fence as a
reaction to the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ has fueled border discourses on how to deal with the
‘influx’ of refugees coming to Europe. Border areas at Europe’s margins can be identified as an
assemblage of actors, materiality, negotiations and relations. Additionally, interweaved
techniques of governing, exposing and steering the refugee’s body become evident. Drawn on
Simon’s approach on social infrastructure and Holzhey’s theoretical stand of multistable figures, I
conducted fieldwork in three border regions (Hungary, Croatia and Turkey). I propose to identify
these border regions as horizontal architectural entities embedded in a highly relational sphere of
connectivity and movement. In investigating border regions through an infrastructural lens,
mutual performances and trajectories between actors and materiality become visible and
tangible. The fieldwork provides insight into some of what defines bits and pieces of
contemporary border-refugee-relations. Rather than articulating their Janus-faced conception, it
outlines the border region as a multiple layer in which affective and uncertain space emerges.
The construction of the citizenship of young refugees: A policy analysis and ethnographic
study in Belgium.
Lesley Hustinx (Ghent University)
Rachel Waerniers (Ghent University)
Scholars agree that international migration challenges a national conception of citizenship. It
puts the nation-state as the only source of authority for citizenship under pressure and uncovers
the exclusionary mechanisms inherent to this conception of citizenship. National governments
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are adopting even more restrictive policies as a response to the increasing numbers of asylum
seekers. But at the same time, refugees are told to integrate as fast as possible in the society.
Scholars state that these tensions are transforming the concept of citizenship. However, there is
little empirical research on this possible transformation. As research shows that the way refugees
and their citizenship are discursively constructed in policy plays an important role in the
integration process of refugees, we want to investigate how the refugees’ citizenship practices
interact with the policy discourses to construct their citizenship position. For this purpose we
conducted a discourse analysis of the migration policies in Belgium between 2011 and 2014
focusing on how the citizenship of refugees is framed and what kind of citizenship is allocated to
them and an ethnographic study focusing on the reactions of young refugees towards these
discourses. In line with critical theories of citizenship we make use of a broad definition of
citizenship. Our analysis shows that refugees are denied agency as full citizens in migration
policies by categorizing migrants as profiteers and criminals or as victims. Within the group of
refugees, young refugees are often approached as victims and even more vulnerable. Participant
observation and in-depth interviews with young refugees provide insight in their different
trajectories towards political awareness and creation of subjectivities in light of these discourses.
In this paper we show that policy discourses and the practices of refugees do not produce a
dichotomy between citizens and non-citizens, but that a more complex gradation comes about.
WS 24: WELFARE STATES AND LABOUR MARKETS IN TRANSITION
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Heidi Moksnes
Location: Room C231
“The undocumented migrant” in legislation processes.
Mervi Leppäkorpi (University of Eastern Findland)
In Sweden and Finland there have been campaigns for granting access to health for
undocumented migrants leading to a legislation process. The definition of ”undocumented
migrant” varies in both cases and in both cases the definition still excludes groups out of the
universal access to health services. I look into the civil society argumentation in Finnish and
Swedish legislation process documents to see, how ”the Undocumented Migrant” has been
presented and who are the chosen groups and persons to do it. I will compare documents to find
out, where are the differences and similarities in defining the deserving group and (re)presenting
it.
The construction of the figure of the immigrant and the birth of immigration laws.
Andrew Crosby (GERME – ULB)
This article analyses through an historical lens how the policy of expulsion of foreigners in
Belgium was born and how it transformed through time. Relying on the analysis that the rise of
state intervention in the last quarter of the 19th century, which elevated nationality as
demarcation criterion, I say that these changes can only fully be understood if we take into
account the ideological origins and use of the policies. Hence, the paradigm of the state of
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exception is used to describe the policies that specifically targeted political opponents and
destitute foreigners. Lastly, following Garfinkel’s theory of degradation ceremonies, I analyse
how framing the foreigner as an unethical subject was an important step in legitimising the
exceptional power of expulsion.
Enacting migrants, minorities and the nation: On the double social life of statistical
categories.
Francisca van Gromme (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Stephan Scheel (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Though statistical ‘matters of fact’ feature prominently in the arguments of anti- and promigration advocates alike, critical migration studies scholars have so far largely refrained from
interrogating or even engaging in the production of migration-related statistics, discarding them
as ‘number games’ and ‘control knowledge’ instead. Starting from the premise that statistics are
important means for constituting migration, ethnic minorities and populations more generally as
intelligible objects of government, this paper explores the role that categories play in the process
of counting populations into being. Based on ethnographic research in statistical institutes in
Estonia and the Netherlands, the authors demonstrate how statistical categories do not just
account for an existing population, but rather help to bring it into being in particular ways. To
this end, the authors make – illustrated through the categories of the ‘Caribbean Netherlands’
and the ‘third-generation migrant’ – three interrelated arguments: First, statistical categories are
not reducible to neutral definitions of groups of people to be quantified. Rather, statistical
categories are always already social categories that carry particular histories, political projects and
imaginations which in turn entail tacit assumptions about the real. Due to these tacit
assumptions, statistical categories are, secondly, not only part of the social worlds they seek to
describe. Rather, statistical categories are also constitutive of these social worlds. In the case of
population statistics, we argue third and finally, that categories do not only enact populations in
particular ways, but also help to narrate and consolidate particular accounts of ‘the nation’. From
this follows that statistical categories, and the processes of boundary drawing implied by them,
offer a valuable vantage point on the narratives through which a given nation imagines itself.
The intercultural double absence of the migrant. Good will and desire for control.
Walter Stefano Baroni (University of Manchester)
Intercultural discourse is characterised by its good will to create a space for communication and
exchange between natives and foreigners – or, more concretely, between immigration societies
and their migrants. In this paper, more specifically, it is regarded as a linguistic area where
different kinds of enunciation overlap: from the discourse of the social sciences involved in a sort
of intercultural enlightenment, to the autobiographical speaking out of migrants committed to
raising consciousness on interculturality. While interculturality is directly promoted by the EU
on a European level, I will discuss the Italian situation as a highly significant case study. As a
consequence of the wars and social crises impacting nearly all Southern Mediterranean
countries, migration pressure has dramatically increased on Italian shores over recent years. The
arrival of new migrants brings with it a heightened fear of immigrants, producing a racist
outburst, fostered by populist parties. Intercultural awareness has been called upon to confront
these circumstances – has it been up to this challenge? To answer this question, this article
examines scientific and fictional texts promoting interculturality in Italy in accordance with the
critical discourse analysis approach, with a particular emphasis on Foucault’s contribution.
Results of this investigation indicate an overall failure of the intercultural approach to tackling
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racism and fear of the other. The figure of the migrant fluctuates between ethnical stereotypes
and his/her apotheosis as a herald of a new world of differences, because the intercultural
discourse cannot recognise his/her right to be “normal”: migrants can only exist in a state of
exception. To use a phrase borrowed from Abdelmalek Sayad, this is the double absence of the
migrant within intercultural discourse: he/she exists as a sketchy silhouette or as an exceptional
being, but never as a political subject.
Monitoring ethnic diversity: A Latin American experience in the UK.
R. Rodriguez Pau (SRCF)
Dissemination of report on recognition of Latin Americans as a group in the UK which was
conducted during 2013-2014. Elements of identity and needs of former refugees and asylum
seekers as well recent secondary migration of Latin Americans from Spain to UK are explored.
There are different contexts of time, space and reasons for migration of Latin Americans to the
UK. Nevertheless, Latin Americans in the UK seem to be having a great many common needs
regardless of the fact of their being diverse communities themselves (e.g. nationality, ethnicity,
gender, language, and so forth). The report chronicles the advocacy movements of Latin
Americans in London from 2000 until 2014, its practices and their aim(s) as to the practical
benefits about the fact of being formally recognised as a group by the state. Examples of certain
degree of 'positive discrimination', but not 'affirmative action' as it is the present style portrayed
in the Americas (USA/Brazil as case studies), are discussed for playing a key role in the
facilitation access to services, improvement on education opportunities, working conditions and
welfare provision to disadvantaged minorities rather than being as a tool for surveillance in itself.
The report presents a number of recommendations and provisional conclusions with regards to
the on going work and developments of advocacy groups/movements of the Latin American
diaspora in Europe. The full report can be accessed on http://evelynoldfield.co.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2015/04/pau.pdf
WS 25: POSTCOLONIAL AND INTERSECTIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Klara Öberg
Location: Room D222
Honour-based violence, migrant status and access to justice: Findings from a study of
migrant women living in the UK.
Geetanjali Gangoli (University of Bristol)
Aisha K. Gill (University of Roehampton)
Natasha Mulvihill (University of Bristol)
In 2015, we were commissioned by the Inspectorate of Constabulary for England and Wales (Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary - HMIC) to identify and interview victims and survivors
of ‘honour’-based violence (HBV) for a thematic inspection of police forces across England and
Wales (HMIC, in press). The researchers were required to use the definition of HBV adopted by
HMIC, as a form of violence which draws legitimacy from the notion of ‘honour’. HMIC
requested that forced marriage (FM) and female genital mutilation (FGM) be included within
the scope of the research in recognition of their separate yet related status to HBV. Our paper
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presents key findings from this project. The work was notable in a number of respects. Over a
10-week period, the research team worked with NGOs to identify and interview 50 women across
England (35 individual interviews and 3 group interviews totalling 15 participants) who were the
victims and survivors of HBV and/or FM (n=36) or FGM (n=14). Our participants were first or
second generation migrants from 15 different countries of origin/or ethnicity, and interviews
were conducted in 9 different languages. Focused primarily on their decision whether or not to
report HBV to the police in the UK and their subsequent treatment by the police and criminal
justice system, the participants related in extraordinary detail their stories of victimisation and
survival. Drawing on the findings, we offer an analytical framework regarding migrant women in
the UK’s experiences of HBV, which explores the particular layers of legal-political, social,
familial, cultural and psychological control which combine to define their experience. Within
this paradigm, immigration status intersects with immigration law and border control to
exacerbate and complicate women’s experience of HBV. Finally, we consider what this means
for policy and policing practice in the UK.
"Women's space is everywhere!": Border narratives – A study of lived experiences and
political discourse.
Marie Witt Gad Johansen (Aalborg University)
Silje Garnås Kristiansen (Aalborg University)
Ida Gunge (Aalborg University)
As part of a larger trend within the EU, the borders adjacent to Denmark are currently strongly
enforced through border controls. At the same time Denmark and Sweden are introducing
several alterations in their respective asylum policies. This project explores this exceptional
episode in current Danish history, through discursive policy analysis and collecting of
narrativesfrom women who are planning to seek asylum in Scandinavia. Power, security and
gender are central factors in examining the concept of a border. We thereby analyse the narrative
of the political elites, who are constructing the current changes in border and asylum policies, as
well as the narrative of the ones who ultimately are affected by these changes; asylum seekers
planning to cross a border into Northern Europe. Another layer to the project is formed through
a gender perspective, as the narratives are told by asylum seeking women who are navigating a
traditionally male field. With this project we wish to shed a new light on the European political
debate on borders an migration, as the different narratives contribute to deepen the
understanding of contrasting perceptions of borders and their functions.
At the borders of gender: Deconstructing the boundaries of gender as a feminist political
category to engage the governing of immigration in contemporary Italy.
Stefania Donzelli (Erasmus University - International Institute of Social
Studies)
This paper discusses the multidimensionality of gender as a feminist political category employed
to engage the phenomenon of human mobility and its governing. To this end, the essay
scrutinises feminist narratives produced on and from lived experiences of political struggles
contesting and contrasting the current governmental rationality regulating immigration in Italy.
In particular, it brings into focus feminist narratives on the gendering of securitization in
immigration policy, migrants’ administrative detention and protection of victims of trafficking,
death and disappearances in the Mediterranean. Then, it examines the conceptualizations of
gender proposed in these feminist narratives, deconstructing the boundaries of this category of
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political practice. Indeed, this paper intends to illuminate the multidimensionality of the
meaning of gender in its current feminist usages, both in terms of its articulation and mutual
constitution with other social relations of power – particularly relations of race – and in terms of
its composition and transformation in respect to transnational dynamics – such as international
migratory movements and their government. In doing so, the paper points out limits,
potentialities, and tensions underlying these feminist conceptualisations of gender. Theoretically,
this essay seeks to produce an original contribution at the interface of the Autonomy of Migration
approach, Intersectionality, and Transnational Feminism. To this purpose, the paper discursively
analyses the following primary sources: in-depth interviews’ transcripts with feminist activists
and various types of feminist documents such as communication statements, flayers, and zines.
This material was collected during one year of fieldwork and it covers experiences of feminist
organizing on the governing of immigration in Italy from 2007 to 2013.
Making feminist arguments and strategies against borders and regulated migration.
Disa Helander (Gothenburg University)
This paper discusses theoretical critiques and practical resistance to regulated migration and to
borders more generally. My aim is to explore how we can make strong arguments and strategies
against borders and regulated migration and, more specifically, to discuss this by exploring what
feminist theory can contribute to the theorising and critique of borders and regulated migration.
I do this by discussing what I have grouped into five different types of arguments against
regulated migration: (1) arguments by Giorgio Agamben, (2) arguments focusing on citizenship,
(3) arguments focusing on labour and capital, represented by Nicholas De Genova, (4) arguments
from the perspective of indigenous peoples and that focus on the racialising aspect of borders,
represented by Harsha Walia, and (5) arguments that focus on how borders produce many kinds
of subjects, represented by Bridget Anderson. I analyse these five approaches by reading each of
them through feminist interventions, as well as through what I have learnt through my
engagements in activist work against regulated migration. I argue that strong arguments and
good strategies must connect borders/regulated migration to various power relations; conceive of
borders and regulated migration as productive/constitutive of subjects, social and political
relations, and imaginaries; and must not secure the freedom of movement (and freedom to stay)
for some people at the expense of that of others. I discuss, among other things, the normative
constitution of citizenship and of deservingness, as well as the division and relation between
reformist and revolutionary strategies, in this case how we can understand and negotiate, on the
one hand, a principled rejection of certain institutions and practices – for example the migration
authorities – with on the other hand, a sometimes immediate need to engage with these
institutions and practices in order to secure the most basic needs of undocumented migrants.
Feminist fieldwork and migration control: Reflections from the migrant route through
Mexico.
Sara Alemir (Lund University)
This paper is based on the challenges and choices I faced during engaged fieldwork along the
migrant route in Mexico where hundreds of thousands Central American migrants travel each
year with the objective of reaching the US border. Mexico is likewise the world´s largest migrant
corridor between the Global South and North where organized crime and corrupt police
increasingly has taken control. Aided by a feminist methodological framework I reflect on the
process of translating the fieldwork into a deeper analysis of the gendered contours of migration
control. I likewise discuss the potentials and pitfalls of doing engaged fieldwork in contexts of
war and violence and how a feminist departing point could be used in this regard.
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WS 26: RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF REFUGEE PROTECTION
Strand Organisers: Stephan Scheel & Martina Tazzioli
Chair: Lorenzo Vianelli
Location: Room D328
Whom calls law a refugee? Refugee definitions and the politics of denomination.
Dana Schmalz (University of Frankfurt)
“These persons are no actual refugees” is a statement regularly heard in recent months, often
used to argue for restrictive border policies. By “actual refugees”, such statements usually mean
to refer to the definition of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention (GRC). But can we conclusively
draw from this definition, who is entitled to protection? How does a more general notion of the
refugee relate to its legal definition? And who has a say in challenging the (legal) definition of the
refugee? Examining the historical development of refugee definitions in law and comparing
provisions in different regional treaties, I will argue that we see a “politics of denomination”.
Many states of the Global South have implemented broader definitions of the refugee, which
include i.a. flight from indiscriminate violence.2 Most states of the Global North, by contrast,
have limited the use of the term to the definition offered by the GRC. This identification of the
refugee notion with the GRC-definition is deepened by additional rules of protection, which use
alternative denominations for those entitled, and often come with a less favorable regime. These
patterns in the use of the refugee notion highlight the significance the concept has beyond
concrete legal entitlements attached to it. It is my proposition that the “politics of denomination”
point to the cosmopolitan brisance involved in the refugee concept, which inside and outside the
legal realm serves as a reference term for negotiating rights to access and protection.
Refugees, guests and status decisions: Are they all the same? Rethinking refugee
protection in Turkey and the EU.
Funda Ustek-Spilda (Goldsmiths, University of London)
The growing number of displaced people seeking refuge in Europe and in Turkey is testing the
limits of the international agreements and conventions in place for refugee protection. Even
when there are accepted definitions for “asylum seekers”, “refugees” and “internally displaced
people”, how these categories are implemented and how protection is allocated differ
significantly. Moreover, in the light of current state of affairs, to deal with the number of
applications, some countries are coming up with new classifications on their own, and new
protection schemes (such as the statusentscheidunge (status decisions) in Austria or guests in
Turkey). Accordingly, in this paper I argue that the current refugee crisis is not simply a result of
the sheer number of applicants but the inherent problems within the refugee protection system
itself. The empirical material for this argument comes from ethnographical fieldwork carried out
in Turkey and at international meetings on refugee statistics. EU-level and international
organisation reports on the current refugee crisis are also utilised to shed light on the politics of
determination of refugee status and protection.
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The (non)researched attributes of refugee identity and their role in (un)successful
integration.
Kristýna Tamchynová (University of Economics, Prague)
This paper aims to examine, on the specific case study of Syrian refugees in Turkey, whether
attributes of the identity used to describe refugees are the same, as those important for the
refugees themselves. Based on the common description of refugees as homogeneous group of
people who may be threat to us, little attention is paid to their life-stories, their former
education, employment and experience. We witness disrespect shown to them, as well as lack of
interest in what is really important to them, in comparison with what we think that should be.
This is another strain in already complicated process of integration as it reinforces the feeling of
estrangement from the majority population. Understanding of how refugees define themselves
and, consequently, ability to work with the attributes of identity may be crucial for effectiveness
of integration strategies. With this purpose in mind, I give floor to refugees to tell their stories
and then use narrative analysis to define the identity attributes on which they focus. I put them
in sharp contrast to the existing research suggesting in the end how those attributes may be used
to improve integration systems.
To whom should we grant asylum?
Felix Bender (Central European University)
By the end of the year 2015, more than a million people have crosses the borders to the European
Union with the goal of seeking refuge. Yet, who has a right to do so? Who ought to be seen as a
refugee and who not? In other words: whom should we grant asylum? These are the questions
that this paper attempts to answer. I will do so in two steps. First, I will provide a conceptual
history of the concept of asylum, outlining the shortcomings of the definition of the refugee as
provided by the Geneva Convention of 1951 and the amending Protocol of 1967. I will show how
the concept of asylum contains a decisive political meaning, which is not captured by the
Convention. Second, I will attempt to show why this widened scope of the concept of asylum
deserves normative consideration. I will draw on the work of several scholars such as Lea Ypi,
Andrew Shacknove and Jürgen Habermas in arguing that the right to be granted asylum should
hinge on the bond between the applicant as a citizen and his state being severed. This, I claim, is
not only the case when negative rights of citizens are violated, but also when they are barred from
enjoying positive democratic rights. The justification for such a claim lies within the cooriginality of negative rights and positive collective freedom. As Habermas states, none can exist
without the other, and I contend that the same standard should hold when defending the claim to
a widened political concept of asylum.
WS 27: FILM SCREENING
Time: 14:15 – 16:00
Chair: Minja Niemi
Location: Room D337
Förvaret (The Detention Center)
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Förvaret is an award-winning documentary from within a Swedish immigration detention centre.
Awards: Winner best documentary, Guldbaggen / Swedish film awards 2015 Official
selection One World, Prague, March 2016 Official selection One World Official selection
Gothenburg International Film Festival 2016 Nominated Tempo Documentary Award
Winner Victor Award / Best Feature Film Shot in Stockholm-Mälardalen 2015 Official
selection Stockholm International Film Festival Official Selection Nordisk Panorama
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PARALLEL
WORKSHOPS 3
THURSDAY JUNE 16TH // 11:15-13:00
WS 31: CONTESTATIONS: ACTIVISM AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE #1
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman & Pouran Djampour
Chair: Pouran Djampour
Location: Room B231c
Traces of dissensus: Resisting immigration raids in London.
Johannes Balthasar Oertli (SOAS, University of London)
Kiri Santer (SOAS, University of London)
Studies of activism have sought to theorize the transnational, interconnected nature of solidarity
movements (Juris 2008). Often though, the affective registers within moments of political action
are neglected. Whilst considering political action as embedded in a material network of people,
places and documents, this article asks what the relation is between the singular moment of
dissent and the wider movement of bodies attempting to build resistance to immigration raids in
London. It correlates Jacques Rancière’s conception of dissensus to manifestations of opposition
to immigration raids in London and aims to show that concrete moments of resistance do not
simply disappear into the sea of consensus once their materiality has ceased to be. By
interweaving the voices of people fighting against immigration raids in London with affect
theory, it argues that moments of the political also become part of a different timescale, which
precedes and proceeds from their immediacy. The affective registers of ‘hope’ and
‘empowerment’ contribute to an understanding of action rooted within the present, but
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ultimately bound to the project of a bettering of attachments, between subjects whose actions are
taken forward on a pre-supposition of equality. It concludes by stating that singular moments of
dissent leave affective traces and have the potential to revive the present, disfiguring it on behalf
of what it could become: the material difference between being detained or not.
Migration management in Berlin: Emergency centers and struggles against them.
Žiga Podgornik-Jakil (Freie Universität Berlin)
The author of the paper investigates the recent 'migration management' developments in Berlin,
Germany, specifically, the sudden proliferation of the so called emergency accommodations (die
Notunterkünfte) for the asylum seekers. He deals with the fact, that such collective
accommodations are being outsourced by the state to the private actors, from which – or at least
should - the latter profit. Through the cooperative empirical investigation with an activist group,
which monitors such developments by cooperating with asylum seekers accommodated in
mentioned spaces, they find out that such responses are overly dehumanizing, taking away
control over asylum seekers’ lives. Small collective actions, such as hunger strikes, and
networking with activist groups thus contest such social orders. The paper is thus two fold, firstly
it deals with the macro-analysis of the political economy of emergency center business model and
secondly, through cooperative activist research, it deals with actions and struggles of
accommodated asylum seekers against it.
“We are actively integrating ourselves into the struggle”: Detainee activism and the
contestation of migration enforcement “from below”.
Leah Montange (University of Toronto)
Immigration detention centers are spaces that immobilize migrant bodies in a space “outside” the
imagined nation; they are also spaces where the nation itself is constituted against an Other (the
detained migrants). In this presentation, I complicate this understanding of immigration
detention centers as spaces of transnational migration management “from above” by
conceptualizing the role of hunger strikes in shaping the constitution of borders, citizenship, and
border-crossing “from below.” In this talk I narrate an account of the 2014 hunger strikes at the
Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA. This series of three hunger strikes was aimed at
transforming conditions in the facility and US immigration policy; it gained traction with local
and federal political actors, shaping migration management politics at the bodily, local and
national scales. I analyze how, through their actions with their bodies, statements, connections
with each other, and coordination with media, legal support and organizing outside the detention
center, detainees reworked and contributed to ongoing contestations over whose voices can make
claims and whose bodies are legitimately inside the United States. It is through these
relationships that detainees forged both inside and outside the detention center that they were
able to seize a political opening. Ultimately I argue that scholarly conceptions of the geopolitical
and biopolitical work that detention centers do must account for the active contestation of
citizenship, borders, and (im)mobility by detainees. This paper contributes to our understanding
of activism and organizing by migrant detainees, the autonomy of migration, and the role of
transnational and non-state actors in managing migration.
Contesting the Dublin Regulation: Refugees claim ‘hereness’ and personhood in Germany.
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Fazila Bhimji (University of Central Lancaster)
This study demonstrates how a specific law affects refugees in Germany who first enter the EU
through external States such as Italy, Spain, or Hungary. The law is known as the Dublin
regulation or Dublin 111. The Dublin regulation only allows refugees to make asylum-claims in
the EU country through which they first enter and where they are fingerprinted. The study
shows how refugees upon arrival to their preferred State such as Germany negotiate and discover
strategies to continue to survive and stay in Germany. The refugees form social networks, learn
German, and engage in political actions. Linda Bosniak argues that undocumented immigrants
experience diminished personhood because of stringent laws and border controls. This essay
argues that the refugees who remain ineligible to claim asylum in Germany struggle to claim
personhood and their sense of dignity. This empirical study contributes to scholarship, which has
focused on undocumented immigrants’ resistance and political actions within Europe by
depicting the experiences of refugees directly affected by EU asylum policies. Data are drawn on
18 interviews as well as several informal conversations over a period of eight months from
January 2015 to August 2015 in Berlin and Brandenburg, Germany.
WS 32: CONTESTATIONS: ACTIVISM AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE #2
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman & Pouran Djampour
Chair: Carin Cuadra
Location: Room C127
School outside these four walls: Contesting irregularization through alternatives to
education.
Tanya Aberman (York University)
Philip Ackerman (University of Toronto)
Over the last decade, Canada has witnessed a complete overhaul of its refugee and immigration
processes, resulting in the unravelling of a longstanding history of humanitarian contributions.
As migrants’ situations become increasingly precarious, and pathways for permanent residence
are quickly eroded, one area of bordering that has importantly impacted migrant youth involves
access to education. While there are a limited number of concessionary policies that promote
some level of access at elementary and secondary levels, many youth remain burdened with
feelings of being othered, disengaged and illegalized, throughout their educational trajectories.
The weight of this exclusion is exacerbated by additional factors including: fear of deportation,
non-recognition of home country credentials, negative racialization, feelings of being delrailed
from their professional path, and other intersections of precarity and dispossession. This paper
will explore the processes of irregularisation for precarious status migrant youth, with a
particular focus on their point of intersection with Canadian education systems. It will draw
attention to emerging contestations against this irregularization through community-driven,
humanitarian and activist responses at all levels of education. Particular attention will be paid to
the needs-based development of alternatives to education, which provide opportunities for youth
to continue on their paths without losing momentum. A few case studies will be highlighted
through a Toronto-based organization, the FCJ Refugee Centre, including two free schools for
precarious status migrant youth, a participatory research project, and several arts-based,
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awareness-raising initiatives. These projects are all unique in their capacity to value the diverse
social locations of precarious status migrant youth as they attempt to navigate Canadian
education systems.
Activism as career of Indonesian return migrant workers.
Akuat Supriyanto (Universidade do Porto, Portugal & Universitas Padjadjaran,
Indonesia)
Carlos Cabral-Cardoso (Universidade do Porto, Portugal)
Return migration is an underexplored enclave of migration studies. The literature in this field
focus mainly on themes related to motivation to return, the role of remittance, and the
significance of the returnees to local development. Previous studies also discuss the orientation of
return migrant workers towards entrepreneurship. However, the literature seems to overlook the
concept of career as an economic function. Career is described as series of work experiences over
time. Axel Honneth (1995) argues that work is both an economic and a moral endeavour. Work is
assumed to have normative and emancipatory contents. On the one hand, work has a
transcendence capacity to connect with social reality. On the other hand, work plays a significant
role in changing society. Consequently, studies on career of returnees must be expanded to
accommodate the phenomena of work as moral ‘amplifier’. This study seeks to investigate cases
of Indonesian return migrant workers who decided to work as social activists. Data collected by
interviews are presented into three biographical narratives and analysed comparatively through
the lenses of Honneth’s theory. The adoption of Honneth’s critical approach enables to relate the
work and suffering experienced by migrant workers with social activism as career choice. The
results suggest that the experience of mistreatment in the workplace deepened returnees’
understanding of the problem of recognition and inequality, and portrays social activism as forms
of continued struggle for recognition. In addition, the study attempts to contribute to policy
discussion on how to combat inequality in the migrants’ workplace and after they return to their
home countries.
“The facts by those who bear them”: Scholarly activism and ‘theory- praxis unity’ in the
framework of anthropological migration research.
Sofia Vlachou (Panteion University of Athens, Greece)
Since a few decades, anthropology has been enriched by an infusion with revolutionized,
intellectual strands such as critical theory and feminist studies. Those strands clearly contributed
to its distancing from positivist, technocratic approaches of further empirically- based social
sciences and brought it closer to a commitment of being politically meaningful in the present.
Arguably, the study of Migration has long now constituted a prominent field of such
commitment instances. However, the shift away from the long- withstanding maxim of “The
Anthropologist” as an eternal bohemian and comprehensive outsider, towards the figure of an
involved, knowledgeable participant automatically challenges established standards of research
reliability and validity and creates a tension between value free- and truthful science. This
presentation seeks to critically reflect on the politics of representation by focusing on
methodological and ethical aspects of scholarly activism and highlighting its delimitations as it
develops during the mingling of the positions of engaged observer, activist participant and
bearing subject in the study of Migration. Drawing on the turbulent Greek context, some of the
basic questions that are going to be dealt with address the following: What are the usual
opportunities of academic researchers’ participation in Migration- related activism? What is the
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political significance of cultural activism? Is always the mediation of specialists necessary in
order to contradict power with truths of the vulnerable? What errands may humanitarian,
scholar activists perform among the impulse of direct (re)action to disaster, the will for
formational self- achievement and institutional offers for the legation of migration policies?
Finally, what can activist anthropologists still grapple with, when grass- roots Migrant and
Refugee movements decide to voice themselves directly?
Integration against the will of the state: The struggles of deportable immigrants for
regularisation in the UK.
Reinhard Schweitzer (University of Sussex)
With limited success migrant receiving states are trying to reduce the number of foreigners
residing irregularly within their borders by either legalising their stay or removing them from
their territory. Looking at the UK, this contribution explores the dialectic relationship between
this particular set of state policies and individual migrants’ own agency in trying to regularise
their situation and/or prevent their deportation. Since it is often their local incorporation into
various domains of social and economic life that strengthens their fragile position vis-à-vis the
state, recent immigration policies increasingly ‘illegalise’ these integration efforts. Academia
therefor has to recognise and better understand irregular migrants’ specific agency – as well as its
limits – in building, sustaining and employing these links within their immediate social
environment.
Living liminality. Ethnological insights on the life situation of non-deportable migrants in
Malta.
Sarah Nimführ (University of Vienna)
The majority of rejected asylum seekers in Malta is non-deportable due to a number of legal and
practical factors. Non-removed migrants are in legal limbo since they are neither considered as
official members of the host country, nor are they deportable or able to leave the country by
themselves. In Malta, non-deportable migrants have no formal legal status. This may lead to a
permanent situation with limited access to the job market, basic services and health care.
Dominant regulations are suspended without prospect of inclusion. This results in a permanent
state of emergency. My dissertation focuses on living in “betwixt and between” from a microanalytical perspective. I raise the question: what impact does the non-implemented removal
order have on the living situation of affected persons? How do they cope with everyday life?
Which strategies are applied in the area of tension between autonomy and external
determination? Following the praxeological approach of the Ethnographic Border Regime
Analysis my research links different levels of analysis and examines the interactions of various
migration actors. Both subjective experiences and practices of non-deportable migrants and
actions as well as perspectives of regulatory institutions of migration are recognised. Based on my
ongoing ethnographic research my presentation gives an insight into the agency and vulnerability
of non-removable rejected asylum seekers in Malta. I intend to illustrate how intersections of
inter alia gender, race and legal status may lead to social marginalisation and poverty. In
particular, I explore tactics and strategies that non-removed migrants develop to handle
constraints and enhance their well-being in the liminal space.
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WS 33: BORDERING PROCESSES
Strand Organisers: Jacob Lind & Ioanna Tsoni
Chair: Austin Kocher
Location: Room C233
Border management, cooperation and control in the Baltic Sea area.
Goran Basic (Linnaeus University)
Sophia Yakhlef (Lund University)
Recent events in Europe concerning the large influx of irregular migrants and re-implementation of border
controls have drawn our attention towards European migration management and border politics. Border
officers claim that they must rely on cooperation to perform their duties of border guarding. In 2014 a
collaborative project initiated by the Stockholm County Police, Border Division in Sweden was
commenced. The project was partly funded by the European commission. The participants were border
police and border authorities in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. This is a qualitative study
based on empirically gathered material such as field interviews with border officers and fieldwork
observations. This study suggests that the border officers re-negotiate spatial and cultural identities to make
cooperation possible creating new distinctions and boundaries of “us and them”. The border officers are
united in their views and efforts to protect EU territory and Schengen space from criminal activity but
some express ambivalence towards categories of “criminals” concerning irregular migrants. At the same
time, cooperation and increased social interaction stimulate the officers to create new categories of “us and
them”; those who you know personally trust and those whom you do not know and cannot trust. Earlier
distinctions between the east (the former soviet states such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and the west
(Sweden and Finland) are in some ways diminished through interaction and close cooperation. Instead,
the Baltic Sea officers create distinctions between themselves and southern European countries regarding
work methods, general attitude, opinions, and efficiency.
"Fortress Europe"? The role of Frontex in the European political discourse.
Bahar Mahzari (University College Maastricht)
During the last years, NGOs, scholars, and significant parts of civil society have harshly criticized
the European Union’s (EU) immigration and asylum system. The EU’s various agencies working
under the Common European Asylum System have been accused of violating principles of
international law and securitizing the phenomenon of immigration. Frontex is one of these
agencies. The political debate around the common border management agency reached its
heights with the shipwreck incident at the coasts of Lampedusa. On the one hand, civil protest
against the European immigration policies has never been so rigorous. On the other hand, the
Union persistently defends Frontex and its role. However, the reasons put forward in the debate
have not been made entirely explicit by the EU. Hence, this paper analyzes EU legislation,
speeches, publications and other Union documents in order to shed light on the main arguments.
With the tool of Analytical Discourse Evaluation (ADE) it assesses the three most salient
arguments consisting of the issues concerning illegal immigration, saving lives and solidarity.
Extracting, reconstructing and evaluating these arguments can place the debate around Frontex
into a broader framework regarding the Union’s legitimacy. Although both, the Saving Lives
argument and Solidarity argument can be regarded as strong, all three arguments can be
rendered questionable in terms of practical reality: the values promoted by the EU do not mirror
the operational reality of Frontex’s tasks and missions.
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Extra-territorial jurisdiction: critiquing the European Union's complicity with external
border control policy on the Moroccan/Spanish frontier.
Holly Saunders (Interzone Voices)
This paper considers whether the European Union (EU) exerts extra-territorial jurisdiction, in
the form of an external border control policy, in the Kingdom of Morocco. The central question
is; whether the EU has 'effective control' over Moroccan security forces, who police irregular
migrants on the Moroccan/Spanish border, through the EU/Moroccan Association Agreement
and other relevant agreements between the EU and Morocco. If the hypothesis is proven it could
mean that, where the enforcement of such policies constitute a breach of international human
rights law, such acts are also committed in contravention of the European Convention of Human
Rights. If liability is incurred by EU Member States, for the inhumane implementation of
external border control policy in third countries, then this could encourage States to support and
implement alternative policies whilst condemning inhumane ones.
Europeanisation of families? Marriages of convenience and EU free movement law.
Aleksandra Jolkina (Queen Mary, University of London)
The transformation of the EU from an economic to a political community has manifested itself in
the introduction of the EU citizenship, as well as creation of a general right to permanent
residence for EU citizens and their family members. The 2004 and 2007 enlargements have
further contributed to an increase in intra-EU migration. Yet, some Member States have
expressed concerns about the 'undesirable consequences' of free movement, pointing to the
perceived abuse of rights. In this context, the phenomenon of marriages of convenience is viewed
as a significant problem by policy makers, particularly with regard to admission of non-EU family
members of (migrant) EU citizens. The CJEU has long recognised the right of Member States to
take measures in order to ensure EU freedoms are not exploited in a fraudulent or abusive way.
The concept of 'abuse of rights' has equally found its way into Directive 2004/38. Nevertheless,
the CJEU has set a very high standard for Member States to establish abuse in the field of free
movement of persons, leaving virtually no space for its operation. Marriages of convenience have
been regarded as the only exception. Furthermore, in light of the ever growing concerns of
Member State governments, the issue of marriages of convenience has become increasingly
addressed by EU institutions, which has resulted in a number of legislative measures adopted in
recent years. This paper will examine the extent to which the development of the concept of
marriages of convenience in EU law reflects the Member States' concerns with regard to the
alleged circumvention of national provisions, as well as explore challenges it may create. In
particular, the paper will focus on the two recently published legislative acts: Commission
Guidance for better transposition and application of Directive 2004/38 (2009) and the
Commission Handbook on alleged marriages of convenience between EU citizens and non-EU
nationals (2014).
WS 34: WELFARE STATES AND LABOUR MARKETS IN TRANSITION
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Eva Wikström
Location: Room C231
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Migrant vulnerability in the inter-American and European human rights systems.
Carolina Furusho (University of Kent and University of Hamburg)
Regional human rights courts have addressed certain groups of migrants as vulnerable to increase
State accountability for human rights. From a feminist critique to liberal law, the purpose of this
paper is to analyze the extent to which the vulnerability assessment carried out by these courts in
the context of migration is in consonance with advancing the principle of universality of human
rights and achieving a more substantive notion of equality. In order to ensure human rights are
equally applied to all, it is imperative that all lives are recognized as equally precarious and thus,
equally worthy of protection from avoidable perishing and of provision for flourishing-enabling
resources and opportunities. Mindful of the State-endorsed exclusion entailed by immigration
and criminal law, I argue that vulnerable migrants such as asylum-seekers and illegal migrants
are often placed in a precarious juridical and material situation which aggravates their
vulnerability to being victimized in abhorrent ways. Focusing on vulnerability-aggravating
factors, a critical assessment further invites an intersectional approach to understanding
victimization such as extrajudicial killings, trafficking in human beings, modern slavery and
other forms of abuse. Intersectionality sheds a light on how systems of oppressive power,
particularly those connected to gender and racial divisions, might contribute to advancing social
injustices and human rights violations. Using vulnerability as a multilayered axis to capture
intersectional burdens, I will unpack different kinds of vulnerability by breaking down this
critique in analytical layers. From this starting point, I will analyze the notion of vulnerability
currently being applied by the courts and explore if rather than merely an "attributional" label, a
deeper, context-sensitive and more relational version of vulnerability can be seen in the horizon
which might tackle structural disadvantages imposed upon vulnerable migrants.
The global politics of human rights: Who cares about Eritrean migrants?
Sadia Hassanen (Stockholm University)
Hauwa Mahdi (University of Gothenburg)
The statistical flow of emigrants from Eritrea has steadily grown since its independence from
Ethiopia in 1993. As of June 2015, UNHCR records 383,869 refugees, from this country of 6 759
999 people at the end of 2015 according to government estimates. This is a micro study of the
nature of repression in Eritrea from émigré citizens’ perspectives. The political motive for the
emigration of Eritreans is well known. This paper will address the political push factors from two
angles. Firstly, we will discuss the human rights condition that motivates and drives families and
individuals to embark on the risky journey outward. Secondly, we will discuss the global geopolitical calculations that blatantly seal Eritreans to their fate, human rights or not. In the latter
proposition, we seek to engage the racist politics that undergird global politics guised in colour
blindness. Theorising the human rights situation will build on international law and migration
institutions, previous academic works in the field and the empirical studies of Eritreans in the
migration system. We will also draw from race studies. The exploration of internal political
repression draws from interviews with Eritreans who have emigrated since 1993, and are
presently spread through four continents. The data has been collected through face-to-face audiorecorded interviews as well as electronically generated (skype) and (blog) materials. The
exploration will be pursued with an adapted form of grounded and stand point theories. We
engage the messy intersections of human and non-human factors, as well the inherent
contradictions in positioning, the fluidity of our abstractions and the stances of institutional
actors and the migrants alike.
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Emigration from Western Balkan countries – an empirical analysis.
Visar Malaj (University of Tirana)
Stefano de Rubertis (Università del Salento)
The decision to migrate is a function of push and pull factors. Push factors include social and
economic problems in the origin country, such as human rights violation, poverty, war, natural
catastrophes etc. On the other hand, migrants are attracted by pull factors in the destination
countries, such as high income per capita, common language, security etc. This study is focused
on the emigration phenomenon in Western Balkans and on the corresponding determinants. We
estimate a particular gravity equation, including two original independent variables, related with
two typical concerns for the Western Balkans: corruption and unemployment. According to the
diagnostic tests, the estimated model fits well the data. Governments of Western Balkan
countries should orient their policies toward the mitigation of social and economic inequality,
the elimination of corruption and of the culture of impunity, and the creation of new jobs. This
will lead to a sustainable economic growth and to the reduction of the number of reasons to leave
the country. Authorities should implement drastic reforms and concrete measures, based on high
quality studies and on successful models of former communist countries, in order to come out of
the long and dark tunnel of transition.
Employment by labour market intermediaries: Prospects and problems.
Johanna Schenner (University of Vienna)
The literature on migration and development has been dominated by debates about discursive
shifts in analysing the nexus between the two (De Haas, 2008), concern about migrants´ agency
(Skeldon, 2008), push and pull factors (Castles, de Haas and Miller, 2014), and rural exodus /
urbanization (Yap, 1976; Gilbert and Gugler, 1982). Since the 1990’s international labour
migration began to grow rapidly. Since 2008 international labour migration has grown less
rapidly, but does continue to grow. The decline in the rate of growth in labour migration may be
explained by the repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis. Today the scale of international
labour migration reached new record levels (Andrees, Nasri and Swiniarski, 2015). Parallel to the
rise in international labour migration LMIs have proliferated. The proliferation of LMIs can be
traced back to the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) green light in 1997 on the
establishment of LMIs as legal economic actors (Peck, Theodore and Ward, 2005). Since 1997
´legal´ LMIs have developed in various ways (Enrights, 2013) while previous forms of labour
market intermediation that had disappeared (or had been illegal, informal or hidden), such as
gangmaster, reemerged (Strauss, 2013). In the literature on migration and development very
little attention has been paid to the role of labour market intermediaries (LMIs) in facilitating
migration and development which is problematic at best. This paper seeks first to retrace the
development of LMIs. The second part explores how LMIs are related to international labour
migration and, by taking the example of UK horticulture, how LMIs may exploit labour
migrants´ vulnerabilities. The final part of this paper explores the challenges to regulating
recruitment by LMIs in global supply chains; by reviewing how recruitment works, why
regulating recruitment tends to fail; and the extent to which subcontracting is a key structural
factor in today’s recruitment market.
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Criminalised labour, criminalised life? Excesses and contradictions in sanctions against
undocumented migrant workers.
Niklas Selberg (Lund University)
The exploitation and subordination of undocumented migrant workers are largely the result of
the law locating such individuals outside of its realms. However, to some extent it is also the
result of explicit legal regulation; according to Swedish law it is a crime (20 kap. 3 §
utlänningslagen [2005:716]) to take a job while being ‘undocumented’. At the same time, a
particular protective piece of legislation is relevant for this group of workers. This means that a
person of a certain status is subjected to both repression and protection on part of Swedish
law.This paper develops a position from which the criminalisation of circulating labor can be
criticized. Drawing from the notion of labor as something inalienable from its human bearer, the
paper argues for the abolishing of criminal sanctions against undocumented migrants’ labor
market participation.The analysis of protection and repression against undocumented migrant
workers is done against the backdrop of undocumented migrants as simultaneously human rights
bearers and “illegals”, from the perspective of the host state. The theoretical framework is not
only the coherence of the legal system but also a critical perspective founded in the notion of
labor power as inseparable from the human. Legally speaking the paper discusses Swedish law,
EU-law, instruments of the Council of Europe and also international labor law discourse (i.e.
ILO-instruments).
WS 35: POSTCOLONIAL AND INTERSECTIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Heidi Moksnes
Location: Room D222
Discursive debate on Iranian LGBTQs’ right in the European media.
Zeynab Alsadat Peyghambarzadeh (Spectrum)
LGBTQ rights in Iran have been a popular topic of discussion in Western media in the recent
years. While Western politicians, social activists and media, are expressing their anxiety about
violation of human rights of LGBTQs in Iran, government of Iran, like many other non-western
governments, claims that engaging in same sex sexual conduct is a Western life style. In this
challenge between Iran and West, some Iranian LGBTQs find no alternative but to seek asylum
in the Western countries and sometimes apply for Western grants for LGBTQ rights awareness
projects. Consequently, the idea that same sex sexual conduct is a Western culture is reinforced.
On the other hand, the security that some of them may enjoy in the Western countries can
enable them to claim belonging to a national Iranian, an ethnical or Islamic identity, proving that
LGBTQs can come from any country including Iran. The hegemonic dominant discourses among
Iranian LGBTQs defines sexual orientation and even sometimes gender essentially and justify
homosexuality and transsexuality as the ways that some people have been born and cannot
change it. In this dichotomist view, people can be either a man or a woman who essentially can
fall in love with a person from same sex or opposite sex. From a Foucaultian view point, this
paper will focus on the discursive debate on Iranian LGBTQs’ right in the European media, after
the Ahmadinejad presidency (2005-2013) who became famous as an anti gay politician by
denying existences of homosexuals in Iran. I want to see how different colonialist, nationalist,
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and neo-conservative discourses around same sex sexual conducts, and also LGBTQ’s discourses
of resistance against those discourses, emerged, developed and affected on each other.
Being "the other other" –Racialised LGBTQ-people and European migration.
Katharina Kehl (University of Gothenburg)
Racialised notions of gender and sexuality have a long history of being used to distinguish
between acceptable and unacceptable ways of being European, and being in- or outside Europe.
In current debates around migration in Western-European societies, sexual rights and the
emancipation of women and LGBTQ-people have taken centre stage in this discussion. They are
being used to frame Europe in a global context as a place of progress, tolerance, openness and
individual liberties. While historically homosexuals have been the cultural Other in Western
societies, they are now increasingly incorporated into mainstream politics as a marker against the
non-Western (often Islamic) Other of migrant communities. This European brand of
“homonationalism” is at work in a geographical space that experiences and projects itself as
increasingly post-national, but whose internal coherence and external boundaries are at the same
time constructed along cultural values. Within these discourses, racialised LGBTQ-people,
particularly those who are migrants, are painted frequently as faceless victims of oppression, or as
“notable exceptions” (having emancipated themselves “their” oppressive cultural background),
not as political subjects. This can make participation in the political debate extremely difficult –
it means taking sides in an imaginary “clash of cultures”, with the expectation to either denounce
one’s migrant background or not to be taken serious within the public debate. This paper
explores the ways in which not only state institutions and mainstream media, but more
importantly LGTBQ/women’s rights organisations have perpetuated dominant themes on
migrants and sexual rights, and what that might mean for activists and researchers alike.
Victimisation, xenophobia and welfare chauvinism in Scandinavia: The case of Norway.
Mette Wiggen (University of Leeds)
This paper will explore how the far right and the mainstream in Scandinavia have for decades
promoted a neo liberal and welfare chauvinistic agenda. In European welfare states there has
since the 1990s been a strong populist backlash against ‘non deserving’ immigrants, especially
Muslims. Muslim women are particularly victimised and the far right is using a peculiar mix of
xenophobia and racism in claiming to challenge sexism and immigrant ‘culture’. Xenophobic
discourse is the norm across Europe, where the main political concern during the current
humanitarian crisis seems to lie with culture and the cost of welfare and humanitarian aid.
Scandinavia is no exception and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance has
long been concerned about racism in Norway, and the European Commission has deemed the
Norwegian media guilty of criticising, stereotyping and generalising in reports on Muslim
immigrants in particular. Increase in inequality and poverty, privatisation of the welfare state, cut
backs, welfare chauvinism and negative reporting of issues involving immigrants is the new
normal in Norway where a coalition of the far right and the mainstream right has been in
government since 2013. Privatisation of the media has also helped obscure privatisation of the
health sector, and is drowning critical voices. Norway tops the UN human development index
whilst an increasing proportion of the population is excluded from the welfare state and the
wealth of the country. This paper reflects on the recent trend in Scandinavia and Norway in
particular and raises the question of whose lives matter in a post social democratic Scandinavia.
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Sámi feminisms – Nation, self-determination and decolonization.
Ina Knobblock (Lund University)
Sámi feminisms has identified the complex ways through which colonialism andracism have
shaped and continue to shape gender relations within the Sámi community, as well as the
experiences and specific positions of Indigenous women in the Nordic countries today. Taking
the narratives of Sámi women activists as its point of departure the paper focuses on Sámi
women's struggles for survival, self-determination and decolonization. A central theme evolving
from women's narratives is the need for Indigenous nation-building and the strengthening of
Indigenous communities and societies. The paper concludes by exploring some implications of
Sámi and Indigenous feminisms for feminist analysis, particularly in relation to issues of nation,
belonging and boundaries.
A journalistic space of contestation: The crime myth of Sweden’s Chicago.
Leandro Schclarek Mulinari (Stockholm University)
Exploring the relevance of the city as a space where images of crime are developed and
challenged, this qualitative study discusses why established journalists dispute the crime image of
Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. According to the informants Malmö is used as a code word to
criticize notions of the multicultural society. Thus, it has become a space of contestation.
Departing form an understanding of racism as a structural attribute of the media, the analysis
points to the need of understanding the intimate relationship between media and crime image in
the intersection of two phenomenon: on the one hand race as a conflict line in contemporary
society, and on the other hand the neoliberal transformation of cities.
WS 36: RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF REFUGEE PROTECTION
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Emma Sager
Chair: Funda Ustek
Location: Room D328
Protection despite Dublin.
David Lorenz (Institute for Social Research Frankfurt am Main)
The Dublin Regulation, designed to distribute the responsibility of procession asylum
applications between the member states, constitutes a corner stone of the Common European
Asylum System. Studying the implementation of the Dublin Regulation from the perspective of a
materialistic theory of the state, that conceptualises state politics as outcomes of social struggles
for hegemony, promises to grant some important insights into current politics of refugee
protection: 1. Member states rather perceive their responsibility for asylum claims as a burden,
which they try to pass on to one another. 2. Far from aiming primarily at the protection of
refugees, Dublin is designed to create incentives for a closure of the external border of the EU. 3.
The Crisis of Dublin is mainly the result of resistance of refugees in combination with the refusal
of many member states to implement the regulation thoroughly.
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Tracing UNHCR’s transformation into an agency of forced migration management through
the emergence of new figures of protection.
Philipp Ratfisch (Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies,
University of Osnabrueck)
Stephan Scheel (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Numerous commentators have noted that UNHCR’s mandate and field of activities underwent a
major change after the end of the Cold war, highlighting the predominance of the interests of
Western states in the refugee protection regime. What has not been acknowledged so far is the
role that the emergence of new figures of protection – labels used to categorise certain groups of
people – has played in this transformation process. Drawing on the works of STS-scholars John
Law and Ian Hacking, we refine the concept of figures of migration (Rigo & Karakayali 2010) to
show that new figures of protection do not just reflect transformations in relations of (forced)
migration, but also help to bring these transformations about. The reason is that figures of
protection do not just describe groups of people on the move but rather help to bring them into
being as intelligible matters of concern that require a response by (and transformation of) the
refugee protection regime. This performative quality of figures of protection resides in their
double social life: Figures of protection are of the social because they only become virulent if they
have certain advocates who promote them. And they are of the social because they help to
constitute and organise the social: they don’t just represent a reality out there, but bring social
realities into being in particular ways. We use the emergence of the figures of ‘irregular
secondary mover’ (ISM) and the ‘internally displaced person’ (IDP) to illustrate this double social
life of figures of protection and to trace UNHCR’s transformation from an agency of refugee
protection towards an agency of forced migration management at the service of Western states
seeking to contain the world’s non-insured.
A journey towards protection: Syrian refugees between war and borders.
Maissaa Almustafa (Balsillie School of International Affairs)
Since 2011, Syrians have made some 900 thousand asylum applications to the EU. Refugees, who
have escaped the brutal war in Syria, have found themselves trapped between border controls
designed to regulate refugee mobility and an international protection system that has failed to
offer resettlement. Both regimes have forced those who are desperate to secure safety and new
life, to undertake precarious journeys for Northern Europe where they believe they will find
better protection and acceptance. However, with restrictive European visa systems and border
control, desperate Syrians have been left with no legal routes, but for the undertaking of fatal
journeys through Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. Against this context, I explore this complex
journey of vulnerability and resistance. I situate refugees at the center of my work with a
particular focus on their agency when they are confronted with border controls and a failing
protection regime. Informed by original field research based on interviews and personal
knowledge of the journeys that Syrians have made and are making, my paper examines the
conditions that forced Syrians into this journey, which is an ‘act of escape’ (Mezzadra 2015) and
an access to citizenship but also a process of identity transformation and reconstruction.
International human rights treaties versus bilateral agreements: Implications for refugees
and illegalized immigrants.
Hallee Caron (University of California, Irvine)
As the number of refugees recognized by the UN’s High Commissioner on Refugees swelled to
over 50 million in 2015, governments around the world have taken various approaches to
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addressing what could only be called “a refugee crisis.” This paper explores how international
human rights law concerning treatment of refugees can be at odds with bilateral agreements such
as the 1992 readmission agreement between Spain and Morocco. The readmission agreement,
which went into effect in 2012, requires Morocco to re-admit illegal migrants in Spain who
traveled via Morocco. While there is a legal exception for refugees within the agreement, refugee
status is rarely afforded to people who are otherwise considered illegal migrants begging the
questions: What are the consequences for the people who fall through the gaps in this definition?
What about the “stranded migrants” who spend months and sometimes years in “transit
countries”? Tracing the ever-evolving flow of illegalized migration through West Africa and Spain
to Europe over the last sixty years, I find restrictive immigration policies have moved illegal
migration westward. Where Morocco was once a major source of emigration, it has become a
transit country where some Sub-Saharan Africans fleeing extreme poverty and violence are
becoming stranded.
Refugees’ protection and refugees’ mobility, an irremediable oxymoron?
Scalettaris Giulia (University of Lille)
My PhD work examines the unfolding of an innovative project launched by the UNHCR in 2003
that aimed at blending mobility into the three "traditional solutions" to the "refugee problem".
This project considered the mobility of Afghans – one of the world largest refugee populations as an irreversible phenomenon and as a social and economic resource. The constraints that this
project faced during its implementation led me to acknowledge the state-centred and ultimately
sedentary worldview that underpins refugee policies. Subsequent research among Afghan asylum
seekers in Europe allowed me to examine the constraints faced by asylum seekers on the move
when confronted to the Dublin system (that establishes the EU Member State responsible for
examining their asylum applications) as well as the strategies developed by Afghans to cope with
it. Based on these two researches, this paper reflects on the relationship between refugee
protection and refugee mobility, highlighting inter alia the conundrum it rises and the limits of
the international refugee regime that it reveals.
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PARALLEL
WORKSHOPS 4
THURSDAY JUNE 16TH // 14:15-16:00
WS 41: FILM SCREENING
Chair: Minja Niemi
Location: Room B231c
4stelle Film screening
Marsida Gjoncaj (Lund University)
Valerio Muscella (4Stelle)
Paolo Palermo (4Stelle)
4Stelle Hotel is a web documentary that recounts a day in the life of the multiethnic community
that occupied the abandoned luxury hotel on Via Prenestina in Rome and transformed it into
their own home. For years Italy has found itself under the international spotlight due to the
massive influx of immigrants, who are often forced to live isolated from our society and are
denied fundamental rights. 4Stelle Hotel documents a real response to this critical situation, with
the story of self-organised community that has created a unique social experiment: living together
whilst overcoming cultural and linguistic differences. The Eurostars Roma Congress Hotel and
Convention Center, a modern four-star hotel almost a kilometre from Rome's ring road (Grande
Raccordo Anulare) on the eastern periphery of the city, closed unexpectedly in December 2011,
laying off 60 workers. The structure is part of the international luxury chain Eurostars, which
owns more than 50 hotels worldwide, predominantly orientated towards a business clientele. The
imposing glass strutcure remained abandoned for almost a year, until it became occupied by 200
migrant families, led by the BPM collective (Blocchi Precari Metropolitani), one of the most
well-known movements tacklimg the housing crisis in the capital. The occupation is part of a
wave of activism that took place on 6 December 2012, bringing around 3,000 people living
in a housing emergency into dozens of unsold or unused buildings to shouts of 'let's take back the
city'. 4Stelle Hotel is inhabited by around 500 people, comprising 30 different nationalities,
who predominantly come from the Maghreb, the Horn of Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe
and Sub-Saharan Africa. They have been able to revitalise the hotel through shared reactivation of the rooms and communal spaces, according to a process of internal selforganisation, including cleaning rotas and picket lines. Some of the occupants have lived in Italy
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for years, others have escaped from regimes, revolution and extreme poverty. All of them claim
with dignity their right to a home and a better future. 4Stelle Hotel is the story of this multiethnic apartment building, which is fighting for a brighter future, under constant threat of
eviction by the authorities. The home, in fact, is not only a shelter: it is a right to be claimed and
defended.
WS 42: CONTESTATIONS: ACTIVISM AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE #2
Strand Organisers: Emma Söderman & Pouran Djampour
Chair: Carin Cuadra
Location: Room C127
Irregular migrants on the labor market: Networks for information and protection.
Heidi Moksnes (Stockholm University)
Irregular migrants, along with other labor migrants, are becoming part of the growing bottom
levels of the domestic labor force in Sweden as elsewhere, working for salaries far below regular
national rates and with minimal conditions of security. In the global competition for lower costs
for production and service, they constitute an attractive option for many employers. In line with
the EU Directive of 2009, the Swedish parliament made legal changes in 2013 that, while giving
employers increased penalties for employing workers without permits, assure undocumented
workers access to certain labor rights, such as a salary in accordance with common standards for
the job in question. However, the chances for undocumented workers to find unions to actively
mobilize to support demands based on these new laws are scant, in Sweden as in many other
countries. As undocumented, they are not part of the work force that Swedish unions target –
although some unions have attempted to create specialized arenas for undocumented workers –
and their acceptance of substandard salaries are commonly regarded as a threat against the
nationally established levels. However, irregular migrants sometimes find significant tools
against extreme levels of exploitation by employers through their own networks in the country;
networks among people from their home region, speaking the same language. Such networks can
provide not only contacts with employers who speak one’s language – in itself no protection
against abuse – but also knowledge of Swedish standard levels of salary, of the salaries other
undocumented have received, and sometimes of ways to protect oneself against the most blatant
forms of abuse. Based on my anthropological fieldwork among and interviews with irregular
migrants from Latin America, working and living in the Stockholm region, I will discuss how
their extensive networks offer one of the explanations why they receive higher salaries than many
other irregular workers.
Wanted – A discourse analysis of seven migrants’ experiences of working without a permit
in Sweden.
Johanna Övling (The Museum of Work)
My master thesis Wanted (Efterlyst och eftertraktad, 2015) examines seven migrants’ experiences
of working and living in Sweden without a work- or residency permit. Undocumented migrants
in Sweden lack the citizens’ social, economic and political security. Simultaneously, they are
considered to be a desirable working force in the labor market. The study is based on interviews
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with seven migrants and examines the discourses of the non-citizenship that are articulated in
their stories. More precisely, I have paid attention to how the informants navigate within, and
negotiate with, the discourses. The study shows, among other things, that the informants are
positioned as helpless, hidden and exploited within a “victim discourse”, and as a potential
criminal and passive threat within a national discourse. On the other hand, working experience
also seems to be a possible articulation of resistance against the above-mentioned subject
positions, as it enables the informants to position themselves as active, moral and capable.
Chinese migrant sex workers mobilization in Paris. From invisibility to collective action.
Hélène Le Bail (CERI Sciences Po Paris)
Almost invisible in the Parisian urban landscape a few years ago, the Chinese sex workers have
attracted lots of attention since 2013 with their involvement in the recent demonstrations against
a new bill on sex work. Since then, the Chinese women, mostly irregular residents, have been
invited by elected representatives on local and national level to discuss issues of public security
and potential impact on sex workers of the clients' penalisation on sex workers. They finally
created a sex worker collective at the end of 2014. To explain the rallying of highly stigmatized
and precarious migrant women, three factors can be analysed. First, even if most of them
migrated out of kindship networks, they share a common experience of multi-layered
stigmatization (due to their activity, their administrative status) from the host society, the rest of
the Chinese community and the institutions (primarily police harassment). Secondly, they have
the support of a well-established NGO which mobilized practical, political and media resources
for them. Thirdly, their mobilization took place in a period of legislative reform and of larger
mobilization among sex workers’ groups, it was a window of opportunity. My presentation is
based on a three year (2013-2015) participant observation method fieldwork with the supportive
NGO, the Chinese sex worker collective, during demonstrations against the bill and meetings
with elected representatives and local residents. I also collected flyers, speeches and open-ended
interviews with the NGO members and the sex worker collective's members. I propose a
chronological description of the mobilization process to underline the gap between political
discourses pertaining to help migrant sex workers and elected representatives' difficulty to accept
these sex workers as credible interlocutors and local citizens. It shows how the empowerment of
presumed victims resulted in additional suspicion and stigmatisation.
Trade Union centers for undocumented migrant workers in Germany and Austria as results
of migratory struggles.
Michel Jungwirth (University of Vienna)
Holger Wilcke (Humboldt University)
In the past, Trade Unions in Germany and Austria often held restrictive positions in regard to
immigration and foreign labor. Their position seemed to change by the emergence of Trade
Union centers for undocumented migrant workers in both countries. In public discourse these
centers are recognized as a progressive achievement and union innovation, the direct result of a
controversy concerning the trade unions strategy on undocumented labor migration. However,
we will show that the establishment of these centers can not be conceived without
acknowledging the role of migratory and anti-racist struggles. Illegalized workers in particular –
organized in the campaign of the Society for Legalization (Gesellschaft für Legalisierung) –
forced the German trade union ver.di to discuss the possibility of becoming members without
legally defined status. Their intervention in the union congress was successful, resulting in the
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Working Group for Undocumented Labor, which led to the 2009 formation of the Center for
Undocumented Migrant Workers in Berlin. Following the German example, Trade Unions in
Austria also introduced an advice center for undocumented workers (UNDOK-Anlaufstelle).
While the center has benefited from political backing, its emergence is due to the efforts of
activists, migrant organizations their cooperation with individual trade unionists. This effort to
defend undocumented migrant workers from exploitation is in stark contrast to the established
strategy of attacking and reporting those employing illegalized migrants, mostly regardless of the
consequences for this group. Migratory and anti-racist struggle in Germany and Austria are a
necessity for these centers but have been frequently silenced and obscured. Even though these
support structures are still disputed in the unions themselves, they are the necessary first step in
order to improve working conditions for illegalized migrants and their relations to Trade Unions.
Representing immigrant workers or immigrant residents? Studying the legitimacy dilemma
of an immigrant organization in Los Angeles.
Davide Gnes (University of Amsterdam)
In this paper I argue that immigrant political organizations are constantly facing legitimacy
dilemmas in the context in which they operate. Organizational responses to such dilemmas not
only shape organizational narratives and practices, but also the relation between the organization
and their immigrant membership and constituency. Building on theories of organizational
legitimacy, I plan to analyze the trajectory of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance
(KIWA), an immigrant-led advocacy organization located in Los Angeles, California. Through the
study of the organization’s internal archives and through interviews with current and former
staff, I outline KIWA’s transition from a quasi-labor union to a community-based organization as
it took place in the mid-2000s. In the wake of a major campaign failure in 2003, which sparked a
period of heated internal discussion but also nearly bankrupted the organization, KIWA decided
to change the bases of its legitimacy, both at the discursive level – moving away from contentious
politics to embrace institutional politics – and at the material level – shifting from the support of
activists and volunteers to that of professional advocacy organizations and philanthropic
foundations. In describing the legitimating dilemma as experienced by its main protagonists, I
seek to shed light on two different processes, largely neglected by the literature on legitimacy:
how internal power dynamics affect organizational decision-making, particularly when external
shocks unfold; and how imperatives of survival may drive organizations away from the original
mission and purposes for which they were established.
WS 43: BOOK WORKSHOP
Chair: Martin Bak Jörgensen
Location: Room C233
"Solidarity without borders: Gramscian perspectives on migration and civil society
alliances".
Martin Bak Jörgensen (Aalborg University)
Susi Meret (Aalborg University)
‘Solidarity without Borders’ examines the politics of migration at the ground-level,
considering migrants not as an issue to be solved but as individual political agents,
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exploring the possibilities raised by alliances between migrants and trade unions, worker
organizations, and other constituencies. Applying Gramsci’s theories of modern
resistance and taking up the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey, social movements in Ireland,
and the Lampedusan Libyan migrant group as case studies, Solidarity without Borders
demonstrates how new solidarity relations are shaped and how these may construct a
new common ground for developing political alternatives.
WS 44: WELFARE STATES AND LABOUR MARKETS IN TRANSITION
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Maria Persdotter
Location: Room C231
Articulations of racialisation and the continuum of deportability. Migration political
changes in Sweden 2015/2016.
Maja Sager (Lund University)
Klara Öberg (University of Gothenburg)
During 2015 the struggles of people who searched to enter and move across Europe became
increasingly intense with unthinkable numbers of deaths on the sea and other dangerous parts of
the various alternative routes to and across Europe. Initially Europe witnessed a popular
mobilisation of solidarity and demands for a humane response articulated through government
officials as well as in the media. However, the government responses changed rapidly and were
replaced by a narrative of crisis and a steering towards harsher regulations and closed borders
aiming to limit the numbers of asylum seekers. In Sweden, following the construction of a
narrative of crisis the Social democratic/Green party government and the right wing parties
launched an initial migration political agreement in October 2015 – “Insatser med anledning av
flyktingkrisen” (“Interventions regarding the refugee crisis”) and on November 25, 2015, the
government launched further interventions. These interventions imply a critical shift in the
Swedish migration and asylum regulations and we argue that shift to visibly and bluntly
enforcing the links between migration politics and labour politics. In other words: to abandon a
human rights perspective. In this paper our analysis focuses on the Swedish migration politics’
switching from permanent to temporary residence permits and the racialisation of service and
domestic work low pay sectors. We explore how a racialised and gendered continuum of
deportability is constructed, experienced and contested in the context of these government
responses to present migrations. The analysis builds on two kinds of material: government
documents and press releases regarding the migration political interventions, and ethnographic
material from two different studies exploring structures and experiences of irregularity in the
Swedish context (Sager 2011, Öberg 2015).
Irregularisation of migrants and informalisation of work from a Swedish perspective.
Anders Neergaard (REMESO, Linköping University)
Increased migration and the international restructuring of production are two trends often
mentioned as concrete examples of globalisation. In this paper the aim is to link these
phenomenon by focussing on citizenship and irregularisation of migrants on the one hand, and
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precariousness and informalisation of labour on the other. The theoretical link in combining
partially autonomous processes will be racialisation. An example here is the classic utterance of
the social democratic minister: ‘We need a growing service sector. Not least, I’m thinking of
those who come here as refugees and who can make bread, sew, care for children and clean. They
shall have an outlet for their skills and also get paid for it’ (Jens Orback, DN 31/10 2004). Thus
the aim of the paper is to analyse governance and discourses producing irregularisation and
informalisation through processes of racialisation. The focus will be on an analysis of Sweden
both in relation to the irregularisation of migrants and informalisation of work. The paper start
out with a theoretical discussion of the citizenship-irregularisation of migrant, the
precariousness-informalisation of labour nexus and then continues to how they theoretically can
be captured by racialisation. Thereafter follows an analysis of recent changes in governance
(mainly legislation and collective agreements and the discourses they represent) concerning both
migration characterised by fragmentation and irregularisation, and labour characterised by
segmentation and informalisation. The material for the study is based documents arguing
government, employer associations and trade union positions, as well as supplemented with a
few interviews and secondary literature.
Irregular migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong SAR.
Gabriela Marti (SOAS, University of London)
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong) is
a major destination for migrant domestic workers (MDWs) from a number of states in Asia,
especially the Philippines and Indonesia. Over 320,000 MDWs are currently employed in private
households, in Hong Kong. MDWs are admitted to Hong Kong based on temporary, two-year
employment contracts, and as migrants, they are subject to a number of strict immigration
regulations (notably the “New Conditions of Stay” of 1987). MDWs are required to live in with
their employers, and upon termination of their employment, they are only permitted to stay in
Hong Kong for the remainder of the duration of their work visa or for two weeks, whichever is
shorter (“two-week rule”). While most MDWs in Hong Kong are regular migrants, some are in an
irregular status, for instance since they have overstayed their visa (that is, they have entered the
host jurisdiction lawfully but have stayed for a longer period than the duration of their visa
and/or have breached the two-week rule). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in
Hong Kong (notably interviews with representatives of MDWs’ organisations and NGOs
providing services to MDWs), this paper explores the legal status of irregular MDWs in Hong
Kong, their higher degree of vulnerability to exploitation by employers, and the difficulties they
encounter in accessing health care, education, and migrants’ associations in the Special
Administrative Region.
Making workers illegal sojourners: The case of France.
Caroline Caplan (Université Paris Descartes)
Dumitru Speranta (Université Paris Descartes)
This paper builds on the literature on illegalization (Bauder 2014; Dauvergne 2008; McDonald
2009) to analyze the processes through which France’s legislation concerning the right to work is
construed to reduce the rights to reside. The choice of France as a case study is justified by its
mass production of illegality. According to the Eurostat figures for 2014, France is the first EU
country by the number of third-country nationals ordered to leave and the second by the number
of people “found illegally present”. The phrase “found to be illegally present” refers to people
who are “officially found to be on the territory of a Member State and who do not fulfil, or no
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MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
longer fulfil, the conditions for stay or residence” (Regulation EC 862/2007). Therefore, we
interpret the number of people “found to be illegally present” as illustrating the amount of effort
performed by the legislative and administrative bodies (police, prefecture, labor administration
etc.) to make people illegal. The case of France is remarkable insofar as in 2014, France
accounted for 20% of all the administrative work performed in the EU to found people illegally
present. In this paper, the analysis is limited to the legal provisions concerning employment. We
argue that workers are put at risk of being illegalized through three main processes. The intensive
legislative activity results in (i) a proliferation of the kinds of resident permits, each one
associated to specific working rights; (ii) a restrained access to both (full-time) employment and
to the possibility of changing one’s kind of permit; (iii) withdrawal of the resident permit in case
of violation of labor law. The paper describes both the legislative activity and the efforts
performed by the administrative bodies to enforce the rich legislation.
WS 45: POSTCOLONIAL AND INTERSECTIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Maja Sager
Chair: Chia-Ling Yang
Location: Room D222
The role of migrant agency in the processes of political socialization: the case of the
Turkish student return migrants from Germany.
Seda Aydin (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
The increasing scholarly interest in political and social remittances and migrant political
socialization reveals that the literature tends to consider the migrants as passive receivers of the
political and social context in their host countries, absorbing the first-world values and
communicating them to their third-world home countries. As a response to this tendency, this
study focuses on the dynamics of the migrant agency in the processes of political socialization. It
addresses two gaps in the literature: the common neglect of the processual dimension of migrant
political socialization and the consequent disregard of the migrant agency in the political
socialization processes. I use the grounded theory methodology and analyze the case of the
political socialization of the Turkish student return migrants from Germany (The expression
“Turkish return migrant” includes all ethnicities in Turkey). I base my analysis on the hypothesis
that migrants are not passive receivers of political socialization, rather they may negotiate, reject,
or selectively appropriate the socialization process. My aim is to study the dynamics of political
socialization as a basic social process (Glaser and Strauss 1967) and locate the migrant agency
within it. In my research, the narratives of the interviewees reveal a basic social process of
negative political socialization, by which I refer to the migrants’ socialization to the outsiders’
position of a political system they do not necessarily support. I also discover two core categories,
empathy and rationalism, that play a role in both conventional and negative political socialization
of the student migrants. Habitual, projective and practical evaluative elements of migrant agency
(Emirbayer and Mische 1998) are at work in the constitution of these core categories and the
unfolding of negative and conventional political socialization.
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MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
Imagining the other: the symbolic construction of ‘illegal migrants’ among documented
Mexican migrants in Sweden.
Guillermo Merelo (University of Auckland)
Drawing upon 46 interviews with Mexican migrants in Sweden this paper focuses on the
different ways in which documented migrants construct culturally mediated imaginaries of
‘illegal migration’. Using a semiotic approach it explores the influence of culturally rooted
discourses in the creation of an image of the self and how this affects the perceptions held over
specific migrant groups. A typology is constructed revealing the interplay five symbolic
constructions over which members of the Mexican community in Malmo and Stockholm develop
feelings of empathy, solidarity, neutrality, resistance and resentment towards asylum seekers and
refugees. The paper concludes that symbolic representations of migration are relevant to
understand the types of support and opposition that irregular migrants can obtain from other
migrant groups.
The border and partitioned identities.
Animesh Baidya (Jadavpur University)
The partition of India and consequently the Bangladesh liberation war and the immigration of
inhabitants from East Bengal to West Bengal have long been discussed in a plethora of different
socio-anthological compendium till 1971. The event of immigration has remained superfluous
prevalently in the border areas of West Bengal till today. But surprisingly the struggle for survival
of these homeless people who migrated after 1971 has been little discussed. There remains a stark
difference between the perceptions of identity and the insecurity of refugees who left Bangladesh
before 1971 compared to those who left – and continue to do so - in later periods. This paper is an
attempt to narrate the story of an individual who left Bangladesh as an expatriate and came to
India in 1990s at a very young age, mapping the formation of an identity in this in-between
context. The essay is presented mostly in the form of an interview with the respondent along
with little excerpts from his own diary. The narrative explores the conceptual dilemmas about
community, nationality, manifestations of ‘nationalism’, like the national flag and anthem, acting
in the tandem with the experience of vulnerability, enculturation, socialization and the
illegitimacy of living as ‘resident alien’ in a country away from his motherland. I attempt to focus
on ethnocentric duality, the intractable border meeting the unarticulated reality of existence
‘across’ rather than ‘within’. As there is no as such written document regarding this issue, I think
this oral and ‘Unofficial’ personal narrative can open a new avenue in the context of migration
and refugee studies. The aim is to extend Border Studies to bring these unarticulated realities
upon the agenda of consideration, especially with respect to the subcontinent, and thereby chart
a somewhat different path from that which is delineated by ‘national border’ ideologies.
A posthumanist microethnography of multiculture – Olfactory assemblages in Rome’s
Banglatown.
Elisa Fiore (Utrecht University)
The present article draws from a wider research project conducted in the months of February and
May 2015 in Tor Pignattara, one of the twelve urban zones constituting the V Municipality of the
city of Rome. The project, which takes the shape of a multisensory, posthumanist
microethnography of multiculture, mainly attempts to investigate how affective urban
materialities are capable to organize and co-participate in the iterative reconfigurings of everyday
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MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
experience with/in the locale. In particular, it looks at how material social practices such as
racialization, gendering and classing intra-act (Barad 2007) in the production of constitutive
in/exclusion(s) with/in it. After a brief introduction about the context of the research and the
process of gendered racialization by which it is currently invested, this article proposes feminist
new materialism as a theoretico-methodological framework that counters the epistemological
identity politics responsible for the essentialization and reification of constituencies in the locale.
By conceiving identity structurations as more-than-human assemblages given by the intra-action
of human and nonhuman actants, feminist materialism challenges their assumed discreteness
and poses them as co-constitutive, dynamic and overlapping historical formations rather than as
pre-existing givens. In fact, it accounts for the enactment of the nonhuman in the materialization
of what there is. This article proposes a feminist new materialist reading of food and kitchen
odors in Tor Pignattara as a tool to denounce the arbitrariness of the dichotomous thinking that
structures life in late western modernity.
WS 46: RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF REFUGEE PROTECTION
Strand Organisers: Vanna Nordling & Emma Sager
Chair: Fiorenza Picozza
Location: Room D328
Home, agency and power – social reality of Polish refugee camps.
Marta Kluszczyńska (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Aleksandra Reczuch (University of Warsaw)
This paper aims to present the outcomes of ethnographical research in various refugee camps in
Poland. Both of us have the entered the field multiple times in different refuges. Trying to leave
the routes of arrival and personal stories of refugees, we are focusing on the space that have no
notion of place (e.g. Tuan, 1977 [in:] Cresweell, 2004) and which is almost fully constructed by
the authorities. By using the opposition between 'home' and institution, we asked ourselves: Is it
possible to call a place, where there is almost no personally arranged space and the facility is
practically completely fulfilling minimal needs of refugees, a 'home'? By examining different
camp types – from the reception and the detention camps to camp devoted only for children and
women – we show how arrival to a European Union country is not the end of the road, but still
keeps refugees in transition mode. Following the recent work of E. C. Dunn (2014) we point out
at the 'nothingness' which the asylum seekers experience and in which they find themselves to
be. (...) By observing the way people deal with the overwhelming institutionalisation of everyday
life we found traces of the domestication processes and refugees agency in creation of space in
strongly hierarchical environment. The power relations in the field cannot be brought to simple
division between the Office for Foreigners and the camp inhabitants. The divisions are
empowered by a outsourcing management of camps and the highly gendered relations between
inhabitans and staff. In presentation this we discuss some of the aspects of those relations, like:
abuses of the privacy and the right to decide about ones actions, independence of the asylum
seekers, differently understood 'safety' (depending on a type of a camp), the division dirt/purity,
which we found essential to understand social and institutional world of refugee camps in
Poland.
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MIGRATION IRREGULARISATION & ACTIVISM • CONFERENCE, MALMÖ, JUNE 15–16 2016
Degrees of "Europeaness" on the Aegean Turkish-Greek border.
Aila Spathopoulou (Kings College University London)
In this paper, I use the ‘ship’ as an empirical and conceptual tool to illustrate the materiality that
is attached to specific meanings and experiences of “Europeaness” and “Europeanization” on the
Aegean Turkish-Greek border, in relation to the patterns of mobility that have developed on its
waters by the undocumented migrants. Through an ethnographic gaze along with some of the
theoretical tools provided to us by Gilroy’s conceptual framework of the ‘ship’, as a micropolitical and micro-cultural symbol in motion, I examine the different degrees of proximity to
“legality” on the Aegean border and the ways in which they relate to claims and perceptions of
“Europeaness” by the two sides. In other words, I examine how (ille)gallity is (re)produced on
the Aegean, what I call degrees of “Europeaness”, that is, who is excluded and who is included in
the name of "Europe". When referring to the so called “refugee crisis,” the Greek government
emphasizes how Greece has shown a “human face” to the refugees arriving by boat on the Greek
islands, and has thereby projected its “European values.” Contrasting this hospitality on the
Greek islands with the “inhumanity” on the part of the Turkish state, Greece effectively reinscribes itself within “Europe” by depicting Turkey as the site, just beyond the borders of
“Europe,” where “the problem” of a “migration” or “refugee crisis” begins. However, at the same
time Turkey is figured as the ultimate site — emphatically “outside” of “Europe” — where a
“solution” must be put in place, and, therefore, becomes “valuable European”. What satisfies the
requirements of upholding “European values”, in a context where such a high premium is placed
on being useful and valuable to the EU-ropean project and the externalized projection of
“European” border zones? This paper focuses on the political instrument of the ship in order to
understand where and as what does “Europe” emerges, in this particular space of the Aegean
A forgotten voice: Refugee narratives within an emerging European public sphere.
Muhamed Amin (University of Ottawa)
As the current refugee crisis in Europe continues to unfold, much of the media attention has
focused on the failure of EU asylum policies and Europe's indifference to meet the increasing
humanitarian needs of refugees seeking protection within its borders. Despite the social and
political maelstrom that has characterized the crisis, one of its unassuming subtexts has been the
emergence of numerous personal refugee narratives, which have never occupied a legitimate
space within the confines of the European public sphere. Although overlooked and neglected by
more dominant and authoritative actors (i.e. mainstream media, policymakers, anti-immigration
groups) in the past, these alternative narratives have permeated into the mainstream European
public discourse and have helped deconstruct negative attitudes about refugees and how they fit
into an increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse Europe. Given the fact refugees have never been
fully recognized as genuine members of a European public sphere, this article seeks to look at the
manner in which they can provide an alternative voice within the spatial boundaries of such a
polarizing and traditionally one-sided debate. Based on in-depth interviews with both former and
current refugees in Europe, such personal narratives help contribute to better understanding the
refugee experience, thus accentuating the human element that is often neglected within the
discourse on asylum in Europe. It is through them that we are better able to recognize and
appreciate the value of such marginalized narratives, thus reinforcing a more inclusive
membership in this debate.
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The refugee crisis in Lesvos and/as disaster capitalism?
Anja Karlsson Franck (University of Gothenburg)
Ioanna Tsoni (Malmö University)
Around half a million refugees arrived on the Greek Aegean Island of Lesvos in 2015, making it
the primary gateway to EUrope. In the absence of a sufficient state response to the mounting
humanitarian crisis on these islands, civil society actors have played a crucial role in saving lives
at sea as well as in the provision of humanitarian assistance ashore. While local volunteers and
communities, with very limited economic recourses, handled refugee reception during the spring
and earlier parts of the summer, large international NGOs and volunteer groups have since
moved in. As of January 2016 there were more than 80 international NGOs operating in Lesvos
whom, together with around 2000 volunteers, have built an impressive rescue and humanitarian
assistance infrastructure in many parts of the island. The large-scale arrival of refugees as well as
the presence of the international ‘rescue industry’ has had wide-ranging implications for Lesvos
Island. In the following study we approach these implications through mapping the contours of
the ‘disaster capitalism’ that has emerged in the wake of the crisis – highlighting its economic,
spatial as well as moral aspects. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in various sites
throughout the island, our study will discuss which actors have or have not been able to capitalize
upon the compounded crisis as well as show how this relates to the uneven yet distinct geography
of refugee reception in the Lesvos (rescue and registration). While such examination highlights
important economic geographical outcomes of the crisis in Lesvos island, it also opens up for an
interesting discussion around how security, commercial and humanitarian interests overlap as
well as differ in the face of the crisis – and how refugees in this process simultaneously become
constructed as security threats in need of handling, an unwelcome burden as well as a lucrative
asset.
Asylum seekers’ journey through a (changing) Europe. In theory and in practice.
Anna Klitgaard (AAU, Venligboerne Samos)
Nicol Savinetti (Global Europeans)
The various scapes of Europe are changing with the sharp increase in the arrival of refugees and
immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Nepal, Morocco, Eritrea, Somalia,
Congo, Pakistan, Bangladesh and a host of other countries. With a focus on the mobility,
temporal, spatial and the social struggles these asylum seekers and undocumented migrants face,
this paper bridges academia and civil society by presenting voices from both institutions. The aim
of the paper is to bring Europe’s so-called ‘refugee crisis’ closer to home, relationally. We draw
attention to how both existent and non-existent the gap is between them (the asylum seekers)
and us (European residents) using a blend of photographic images, storytelling and reflection.
The ethnographic accounts, heard through the voice a Danish journalist and activist, give details
about the various stages of the journey. The second voice, that of academic and activist,
contextualizes the ethnographic accounts within the migration discourse of different disciplines
(social psychology, sociology, human geography). By combining methodologies and taking an
interdisciplinary approach, we contextualize this historic happening in a manner that is
accessible to a wide range of readers thus achieving our goal of sharing new knowledge with a
broader cross-section of interest groups.
62
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