This study was only possible because of the many people working in the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) who generously allowed me to gain insights into their work and thoughts. I was impressed by the good spirit and welcoming atmosphere I encountered in the office and in the three sections in which I conducted field research. I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the openness of everyone involved and for their -far from self-evident -readiness to invest substantial time and efforts to introduce me to the 'arts of asylum decision-making', for sharing their experiences and thoughts with me, and for embarking on critical and instructive exchanges with me. Six people stand out for having enabled my research in the asylum directorate of the SEM: Stephan Parak, quality manager, Matthias Keusch ( † 20.11.2014), senior legal advisor, and Pius Betschart, vice-head of the SEM and responsible for the asylum directorate and the three heads of the sections in which I conducted research, who remain anonymous. I thank all them for their invaluable support and sustained interaction with me and my research.This book derives from my doctoral dissertation, carried out under the auspices of the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich. I am especially indebted to my supervisors Susan Thieme and Ulrike Müller-Böker but also to the further members of my promotion committee, Christin Achermann and Christian Berndt for their support and feedback during the research and writing process. On my journey inside the asylum administration, I met two considerate and inspiring researchers who shared both my enthusiasm and worries about doing research in the Swiss asylum office, Jonathan Miaz and Laura Affolter, whom with I had the pleasure to collaborate extensively. Exchanges with a few people from both inside and outside academia have been particularly helpful and inspiring for this research:
In Part I, I introduced a set of material-discursive associations that make casework possible. First, I described associations for 'knowing' what asylum casework is about, namely through policy, legal, and organisational framings; and legal devices, classifications, and ways of 'knowing asylum' through heuristics and exemplars. Second, I presented associations for 'doing' asylum casework and thus "act [ing] in the name of the state" (Gupta 1995)namely positionality and membership devices, techniques of super-vision and re-collecting collectives; and key devices that mediate particular facets of the work of assembling cases like recording, inscription, coordination, and writing devices.In terms of the asylum dispositif, I argued that it becomes stabilised -and is in a way constituted -in material-discursive associations such as those introduced in Part I. First, I provided insights into some crucial framings of the asylum dispositif which allow caseworkers to situate their practice -and ultimately to make sense of the various rationalities that inform them (see subchapter 8.2). I suggested some of the ways in which the governing of asylum is crucially entangled in the "relational politics of (im)mobilities" (Adey 2006) underlying much of Swiss (and European) migration policy. I turned to the evolution of asylum law and highlighted some important 'constants' of much legislative activism of the last decades, such as the acceleration of procedures and the deterrence rather than legal protection of asylum seekers. I further situated practices of case-making in an asylum "office on the move" (Fieldnotes): an administration that went through various reorganisations in the last years, and at the brink of a substantial restructuration of the Swiss procedure.Considering knowledge practices involved in case-making, I suggested that they all converge in the need to resolve asylum cases in administrative
Part II focuses on the pragmatics of case-making. After having become equipped to assemble cases towards their resolution, caseworkers in the asylum office meet cases in a number of events along their trajectory (see Figure 9). It is in these events that the asylum dispositif is enacted: brought to life and to having an effect on people's lives. To recall, the dispositif refers to the associations between the heterogeneous set of technologies, ways of knowing and people that gather around the problematisation of asylum and produce its multiple objects as well as its subjectifications and spatialisations. Case-making is thus key for producing the difference between the protective and exclusionary spaces of governing asylum. I suggest to analytically distinguish five "processual events" (Scheffer 2007a) of case-making: 1 openings (6.1), encounters (6.2), assignments (6.3), authentications (6.4), and closures (6.5). In each of these processual events, crucial (dis)associations are produced for cases to become resolvable. For the purpose of my account of them, they are roughly ordered between cases' openings and closures, but may occur in different order and several times along a case's trajectory of assembling.
In this chapter, I trace the question of agency related to dispositifs. I take up the crucial insight of material-semiotic approaches that practices of governing are enabled and mediated by material-discursive arrangements (Latour 2010; Scheffer 2010, 45) of government. Caseworkers are becoming material-discursively assembled or equipped to be able to assemble cases and enact the dispositif (see Rabinow 2003). 1 In the first subchapter (5.1), I assemble individual and collective agentic formations that are crucial for enacting the dispositif in practices of case-making: primarily caseworkers, sections and 'the office'. I suggest some associations and socio-material technologies to be central for assembling them, namely associations that compose a proxy of the 'nation', membership devices, ritualised events of assembling collectives and associations of super-vision. In the second subchapter (5.2), I introduce central devices for re-cording lives in terms of asylum: material-discursive tools for acting upon the lives of those who claim asylum in prosaic practices of case-making. I distinguish between various types of devices, namely recording, inscription, coordinating, and writing devices. Together, these devices are crucial mediators for assembling asylum cases towards their resolution (see Part II).1 This also has consequences for the crucial issue of accountability (see also section 8.1.4):viewing practices as mediated by such composite agentic formations shifts what accountability means by both altering what counts or matters (increasingly numbers), and who accounts (increasingly nonhuman mediators).
Migration as well as asylum governance is crucially about affecting people's (im)mobility directly or indirectly. But what does this mean? Mobility studies provide vital answers to this question. The emergence of the burgeoning field of mobility studies has involved a turn from "sedentarist metaphysics" (Malkki 1995, 227; 1992) to a mobile ontology (see Adey 2006; Amilhat-Szary 2015, 22). The latter implies that everything is mobile, yet some things and people are relatively immobile -because of the different speed of movement, transformation and re-composition of things (ibid.). Consequently, a mobile ontology urges us to analyse the "relational politics of (im)mobilities" (ibid., 90-91; see also Cresswell 2010), i.e., "exploring how different people are placed in different ways to mobility, and thus different ways to power" (Adey 2006, 276). Cresswell (2006), for instance, highlighted that law and legal practice are crucially implicated in producing mobilities:Legal documents, legislation, and courts of law themselves are all entangled in the production of mobilities. Mobilities are produced both in the sense that meanings are ascribed to mobility through the construction of categories, such as citizen and fugitive, and in the sense that the actual ability to move is legislated and backed up by the threat of force. (Cresswell 2006, 150-51) The production of mobilities needs thus to be considered as crucially mediated by law and other elements of material-discursive arrangements of government (Thieme 2017, 245). Such arrangements have been the focus of the emerging field of "migration infrastructures" (Kern and Müller-Böker 2015; Lin et al. 2017; Thieme 2017; see also Star, 1999) which "has explored how mobilities are shaped, regulated, and controlled through a host of various policies, technologies, and practices" (Adey 2006, 276). Such infrastruc-
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