The article engages with biometric data gathering technologies as part of migration infrastructures for the monitoring and control of migration. It explores power and agency by paying attention to ...the complexity of readings, interpretations, and storytelling of illegalised migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps, in the Island of Lesvos in Greece, as they received their bureaucratic legal papers and discussed developments in their ‘cases’. Borrowing from feminist and feminist security studies scholarship, the article argues for an understanding of data gathering and sharing infrastructures as material. It suggests that the datafication of migrants’ bodies constitutes a manifestation of power that ‘enacts’ the migrant body as a subject of power but also produces counter self-subjectifications. The article also suggests an understanding of subject agency as the ‘capacity to act’ within contexts of power. Such a position on the agency of illegalised migrants allows us to examine the emergence of solidarities and alliances and to understand and contextualise not only actions that seem to be questioning and rejecting power, but also those that accept it and internalise it as a strategy of survival and of bettering one’s life chances.
The article engages with the relationship between the chronopolitics of mobility and migrants' narratives of the past, their present suffering, and hope for the future. Data collected through ...observation and repeat interviews with migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps in Lesvos, Greece, challenge the assumption that 'time' spent waiting in the camps by illegalized migrants represents a linear and singular metanarrative of the migrant in 'temporal suspension' from the 'grid of modernity'. I suggest, that the concept of historical time allows for a critical analysis of illegalized migrants' narratives of their past lives, their present suffering and future aspirations, through which they challenge the chronopolitics of control inherent in the current EU migration system. While such narratives might at first sight be understood as accepting a migration system based on suspension and gradual re-introduction into western historical and political time, they present a challenge to the exceptionality of western modernity and their suspension from it. I also argue, that narratives of 'pasts', 'the present' and hope for the 'future', challenge academic discourses of migration that centre on the notion of 'bare life', where historical and political time is suspended in the liminal space of the camp.
European Muslim Diasporic Geographies Tsagarousianou, Roza
Middle East journal of culture and communication,
2016, Volume:
9, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Open access
This article, based on extensive fieldwork among Muslim communities in five western European countries, explores the ways in which European Muslims 'situate' themselves emotionally, culturally and ...politically vis-à-vis fellow Muslims in Europe and the Muslim world. Drawing on theories of space, place and identity, the article examines processes that amount to the construction of translocal/transnational phenomenological geographies through the utilization of time/space distanciating technologies to cultivate long-distance relations that are crucial to the identification process of European Muslims. Through these they engage in processes of cultural negotiation and translation, of forging of local and translocal links and solidarities that rest on making cognitive and emotional investments and thereby constructing and disseminating narratives shared among themselves and other Muslims.
European Muslim consumption practices, including the profound sense of alienation from mainstream media and turn towards alternative, more Muslim media have been interpreted as their exit from ...Europe's media and cultural institutions. However, analysis of these practices indicates that European Muslims have developed critical attitudes towards and distances from European mainstream media along with skills that enable them actively to deconstruct and reconstruct mainstream as well as 'Muslim' media content. It is thus possible both to 'exit' and to develop a 'voice' that attempts to transform mainstream broadcasting.
Back in the mid-1990s, reecting on the use of the term multiculturalism, the American academic Nathan Glazer (1997, p. 8) remarked in his book We Are All Multiculturalists Now, almost every book in ...the Harvard University libraries listed as containing the word multiculturalism in its title in the 1970s and 1980s is Canadian or Australian. This is an important realisation that traces the genealogy of the concept and practice of multiculturalism to two New World countries, largely settled and dominated by European colonists. Glazers remark was intended to posit multiculturalism as a phenomenon alien to his own society, imported to the United States from societies quite different from his own. His argument favours the idea of a more or less uniform national culture inspired by values which every American citizen should consider universal. As such his commentary is coloured by a particularly negative attitude towards multiculturalism. The United States, he suggests in his book, was not traditionally inspired by the ideals of multiculturalism; instead, it was premised on pursuing the course of assimilation of new immigrants into a largely Eurocentric system of values. The shift from a visualisation of American society as one premised on national unity to one venerating diversity was, in his opinion, a development that did not spring naturally from developments within the society itself but was uncritically transplanted into the USA without any due consideration of the devastating consequences it was to have. Multiculturalism is therefore an uncritically adopted fad that essentially violates the established cultural codes and political traditions of US society and has the potential of setting in motion processes of social disintegration and decay. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.
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