In this article I critically interrogate the ways researchers produce knowledge about the making and unmaking of borders. I do so by focusing on social processes of boundary-drawing that have ...dramatically intensified since the 2015 summer of displacements in Europe. I think through some of the methodological possibilities and conundrums that arise if we try to make visible the unarticulated social conventions underlying the everyday thresholds of belonging that determine who is permitted in, and who has to remain outside, the affective socio-political space of societies. By drawing on my own research experiences, I show why methodologies aimed at lending marginalized people a voice often fail to capture the voiceless, silent nature of these boundary-drawing practices. I suggest that in order to bring the invisible barbed wires permeating societies into the open, we need to develop phenomenologies of everyday exclusionary practices, or ‘cultures of unwelcome.’ Through my ethnographic encounters with marginalized refugee youth and individuals who believe that the influx of refugees is a threat to their values and ways of life, I argue for more nuanced research methodologies that allow us to better capture the everyday social processes underlying acts of boundary-drawing. I suggest that approaching border work as an intersubjective, worldly phenomenon involves paying attention to the experiences of individuals who find themselves pushed to the margins of society, and to those who actively participate in keeping people and groups marked as other locked out.
This special issue explores the ways unaccompanied refugee youth in and en route to Europe actively deal with the intensification of exclusionary practices towards migrants and refugees. In the ...Introduction we aim to set the scene for the individual articles by sketching the various political, historical and discursive levels at which the unaccompanied minor has come to be constructed as a crisis figure in Europe. We show how the sense of exceptionality attached to this figure translates into ambiguous and at times extremely contradictory social practices that have far-reaching effects on the lives of refugee youth. In paying attention to the conceptual flaws and dangers inherent in linking unaccompanied minors to ideas of crisis, we aim to demonstrate the importance of taking seriously the ways young people themselves make sense of the ascriptions, ideas and practices they are subject to. We suggest that ethnographically driven research that lays the focus on the ways young people actively navigate the ambiguous social landscapes they are confronted with can form an important means to move beyond the simplistic and ahistorical models of explanation put forward by frameworks of crisis.
This article attempts to theorise people’s balancing acts between conditions of movement and stasis. Drawing on a radical empirical reading of one critical moment that occurred while conducting ...ethnographic research among Eritrean unaccompanied minors living in a Swiss educational institution, it thinks through what happens when this equilibrium is thrown out of whack and life’s flow is suddenly experienced as a standstill. By focusing on the experiences of one young man, it explores the importance of education as a vectorial metaphor for moving forward in one’s life. Zooming in on one critical moment in Abel’s life, it sheds light on what happens when hopes of ‘movement-through-education’ clash with the reality of a restrictive asylum system that curtails young refugees’ hopes for forward movement. By showing the dialectical ways mobility and immobility enter into and envelop each other, the article highlights how an existentially oriented ethnography can be utilised as an avenue for theorising migrant im/mobilities.
In this special section we rethink the role of movement and stasis in an age of globalization from an existential perspective. We suggest that this theoretical avenue is particularly well suited to ...move beyond the dualistic binaries that have haunted much writing on mobilities. Rather than fixating movement and stasis into two opposite poles, this perspective allows us to productively work with the overlaps and paradoxes as they appear in the everyday, thereby carving out a dialectics of im/mobility. We argue that exploring the interplay of movement and stasis has become particularly important in the current global political climate, where the mobilities of people and groups deemed troublesome are violently cut short or obstructed in ways that keep them “stuck” in continuous loops of “motion”. By zooming in on the vectorial metaphors migrants and refugees seemingly stuck in immovable conditions deploy to make sense of their situations, we conceptualize both the existential orientation of migratory projects and the wider social and political coordinates impinging on these inner quests for (forward) movement and/or stillness.
This article discusses how important social markers surrounding the figure of the unaccompanied minor, such as 'integration' and 'deservingness' are negotiated and made sense of by unaccompanied ...refugee youth and their teachers in a Swiss integration class. Starting from the premise of the classroom as both, a project of future-making and control, I investigate the ambiguous potential of education in creating and obstructing refugee youth's pathways into the larger society. By zooming in on the interactions between teachers and students in an educational project in Switzerland that was specifically designed to cater for the needs of unaccompanied refugee youth, I show how a project that is celebrated amongst practitioners as a best practice example for integration in fact creates an insurmountable number of new obstacles for the young people. I suggest that the ambiguous treatment of unaccompanied refugee youth as vulnerable victims in need of protection and integration on the one hand and as threats to the economic and cultural integrity of the Swiss 'national order of things' (Malkki, Liisa. 1995. "Refugees and Exile: From 'Refugee Studies' to the National Order of Things." Annual Review in Anthropology 24: 494-523) on the other, produces paradoxical dynamics whereby young people find themselves left outside whilst seemingly being 'in'.
Exploring the lifeworlds of Halima, Omar and Mohamed, three middle-aged Somalis living in Melbourne, Australia, the author discusses the interrelated meanings of emplacement and displacement as ...experienced in people’s everyday lives. Through their experiences of displacement and placemaking, Being-Here examines the figure of the refugee as a metaphor for societal alienation and estrangement, and moves anthropological theory towards a new understanding of the crucial existential links between Sein (Being) and Da (Here).
This article sheds light on the socio‐cultural dynamics Merkel's open‐door policy set in motion in Austria. Based on the Anti‐Merkel discourses that came to infiltrate Austrian mainstream politics, ...it will show how the summer of displacements 2015 led to a pronounced move to the right. While many commentators have tended to link the post‐2015 triumph of reactionary parties to the sense of crisis caused by the few months the European Union opened its borders to asylum seekers, the article demonstrates that we need to be more careful in our analyses of the roots of exclusion. By zooming in on the everydayness of anti‐cosmopolitan practices in an Austrian mountain community, it argues that if we are to understand the current backlash against liberal and cosmopolitan ideas we need to pay attention to genealogies of exclusionary practices, or ‘cultures of unwelcome’.
Over the last two decades, there has been a radical shift in anthropology from stable, rooted and mappable identities to fluid, transitory and migratory forms of belonging. Displacement has become ...the new trope through which anthropologists have come to look at the world. As a result, place has received an ambiguous position. Focusing on the life experiences of one Somali refugee woman living in Melbourne and her engagement with place, this article questions the current emphasis on space and boundlessness in anthropological discourses on displacement. It argues that rather than developing theoretical concepts that bypass people's experiences, the zooming in on individuals' lifeworlds allows for a close look at the particularity and everydayness of being-in-place. It shows the need for a more complex and nuanced view of displacement - one that values people's lived experiences and one that takes the placement in displacement more seriously.
In this article I revisit debates about the socio-cultural importance of place and permanence in a hypermobile world order. I zoom in on everyday practices in a small municipality located in the ...Austrian Nock mountains region which is at once characterized by a history of cross-border mobilities and pronounced support for nativist ideas and parties. I shed light on the experiences and perspectives of village inhabitants who detest liberal ideals about cosmopolitan forms of belonging, instead insisting on tropes of indigeneity and place attachment (Heimatverbundenheit). I argue that rather than writing such sentiments off as backward, traditionalist ways of relating to the world, social scientists need to pay attention to them. They make visible a deepening chasm between scholarly imaginaries about mobile, cosmopolitan identities and people's lived experiences in an increasingly fragmented global political arena. Taking the lived antagonisms of a hypermobile world order seriously, I aim critically to examine ideas of movement, place and cosmopolitanism pervading modern thought.
PDF
