AAG (New Orleans): The multiplication of borders and political struggles of illegalized migrants and refugees in EUrope

Description

American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual conference

Abstract:
Borders are being multiplied, becoming embedded and normalized in our everyday social interactions, modes of experiences and affective relations. The approaches to the global political situation that has been defined as ‘refugee crisis’ to this has been twofold. On the one hand the EU and the European national governments, after blurring the traditional division between migrants and refugees, responded to the ‘crisis’ by further criminalizing migrants, framing them as a security threat and implementing measures of segregation and selective solidarity. On the other hand, humanitarian organizations, NGOs and charities defined migrants as an humanitarian emergency. Both approached are keeping the condition of refugees and illegalized migrants in a ‘state of exception’ and frame it as ‘an emergency problem to be fixed’. In this context those illegalized “without papers” are constantly governed through and by borders, through and by camps, through and by a constant exposure to a homeless visibility. This paper will discuss how, across Europe, groups of refugees and illegalized migrants have been using a variety of repertories of protest to resist the current migration regime and the politics of borders, contesting mechanisms of both ‘crimmigration’ and victimization that govern every aspect of their bodies and their existences.

Period	13 Apr 2018
Held at	American Association of Geographers (AAG), United States
Degree of Recognition	International