The critical border scholar William Walters argues that although vehicles of mobility (e.g. coaches, boats, and airplanes) are important features of mobility and migration, there is relatively little attention paid to the relation between materiality and migration. This research follows Walters' notion of viapolitics to approach the bordering of mobility from the middle, from the perspective of the vehicle and not just the state, to gain a more theoretical and comprehensive understanding of human mobility and its entanglement with powerrelations. Building upon assemblage theory, mobility studies, and contemporary border studies this research aims to lay bare the viapolitics of FlixBus. Drawing upon a mobile ethnography, that combines my own FlixBus travels with the analyses of policy documents and international agreements, I illustrate how FlixBus represents and reproduces scattered borderscapes. The analysis results in a concluding call for differentiated understanding of body/ vehicle relations in order to understand better the bordering of mobility within the European Union.
Migration scholars, and the universities and institutions who fund them, at times neglect to address the ways in which the traces of the imperial past, and references to the ‘post’ colonial serve to obfuscate and legitimize discriminatory practices in their work. The ‘imperial eyes’ of the academy set the terms and limitations on interactions, locations, and relationality in research, reducing the agency of migrants, producing stratified configurations in the positionality of both migrants and researchers and, subsequently, exacerbating dynamics of exclusion and extraction. As early-stage researchers, we see a critical need for an approach to migration studies which undermines the ongoing impact of colonialism and the normativity of institutionalized, hierarchical narratives that haunt academia. Our research builds on the work of scholars who write about the autonomy of migration, liberation theorists, and critical Indigenous perspectives, but our positions are also influenced by those on the ‘frontlines’ resisting various manifestations of violence and exclusion. In this article, using an interdisciplinary model, we propose the notion of collective self-inquiry to critically question and inquire into our own methods and approaches and provide a set of methodological tools that can be applied by other researchers within and outside of the university. These tools invite us to work collectively and look more critically at the b/ordering of movement(s) across former empires, thus helping us navigate towards the undercommons, a place where the liberatory potential of the academy can be realized.
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