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This article examines how historical and geographical relations of injustice are "made present" through the activities of the City of Sanctuary network in Sheffield, the UK. In so doing, it exposes the limitations of conceptualizing and enacting sanctuary through the frame of hospitality, and proposes an analytics of "rightful presence" as an alternative frame with which to address contemporary sanctuary practices. In contrast to a body of scholarship and activism that has focused on hospitality as extending the bounds of citizenship to "include" those seeking refuge, we consider how the "minor" politics of City of Sanctuary potentially trouble the assumptions on which such claims to inclusion rest. Our emphasis on the "minor" politics of "making present" injustices is important in bringing to bear an account of justice that is grounded in concrete political struggles, in contrast to the more abstract notion of a justice "to come," associated with some accounts of hospitality. To explore sanctuary practices through a relational account of justice brings to bear a politically attuned account of rightful presence, which potentially challenges pastoral relations of guest-host and the statist framing of sanctuary with which relations of hospitality are intimately bound. This is important, we conclude, in countering the assumption that including the excluded solves the "problem," or relieves the "crisis," of asylum.It does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that we are currently witnessing a "crisis" of asylum across what might be called the global "North," in which established mechanisms of providing refugee protection are under question. Concerns regarding the impact of increased applications on asylum systems, alongside concerns regarding the impact of increased arrivals along land and sea 1
full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: publications@warwick.ac.uk 1 ABSTRACT What is the political significance of humanitarian activist engagements with the discarded belongings of migrants? This article explores how bordering practices between states resonate with bordering practices between the human and nonhuman. It argues that attempts to transform 'desert/ed trash' into objects of value are nothing less than struggles over the very category of 'the human' itself. Focusing on humanitarian engagements with the objects that migrants leave behind across the Mexico-US Sonoran desert, it explores how the politics of human mobility involves the co-constitution of 'people', 'places' and 'things' in multiple ways. By contrast to a posthumanist analysis that emphasises the agency of material things based on a distinction between the human and the nonhuman, I draw on the work of Karen Barad in order to develop a 'more-thanhuman' account of the materialdiscursive un/becomings of subjects-objectsenvironments as more or less 'human'. This allows for an analysis of 'the human' as a political stake that is produced through struggles to de/value people, places and things, and that is thus subject to contestation as well as to processes of deand re-composition. The article assesses the various ways that humanitarian engagements contest processes of dehumanisation through the re-configuration of 'desert/ed trash'. Rather than emphasising re-humanisation, however, I highlight the importance of analysis and practice that rejects the lure of 'naïve humanism' and the problematic over-and under-investments of migrant and human agency that such an approach involves. This is important, the article concludes, in order that the multiplicity of ways by which 'the human' is made, unmade and remade is accounted for without assuming either the supremacy or the powerlessness of people.
What are the most appropriate conceptual tools by which to develop an analysis of ‘unauthorised migration’? Is ‘migrant agency’ an effective critical concept in the context of a so-called European migration ‘crisis’? This article reflects on these questions through a detailed exploration of the ‘structure/agency debate’. It suggests the need for caution in engaging such a conceptual frame in analysing the politics of unauthorised migration. Despite the sophistication of many relational accounts of structure-agency, the grounding of this framework in questions of intentionality risks reproducing assumptions about subjects whose decision to migrate is more or less free from constraint. The article argues that such assumptions are analytically problematic because they involve a simplification of processes of subjectivity formation. Moreover, it also argues that they are normatively and politically problematic in the context of debates around unauthorised migration because discussions of structure/agency can easily slip into the legitimisation of wider assumptions about the culpability and/or victimhood of people on the move. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theorisation of subjectification, the article proposes an alternative analytics of acts, interventions, and effects by which to address the politics of unauthorised migration in the midst of a so-called ‘migration crisis’.
This article draws attention to the limitations of the UK's integration and cohesion agenda and introduces an alternative analytical approach that focuses on solidarity, mobility and citizenship over cohesion, integration and community. Developing such an approach through analysing the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, the article has two interrelated objectives. First, it aims to shed critical light on the assumptions regarding community that inform the UK's integration and cohesion agenda, which involves a series of contradictions that exclude asylum seekers and irregular migrants as subjects of integration and cohesion. Second, it aims to offer some reflections on how these assumptions are challenged by the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, based on the activation of mobile solidarities that cut across established social hierarchies. In so doing, the article suggests that the UK's approach to integration and cohesion is flawed because it overlooks engagements and solidarities in which cultural categories and legal distinctions are extraneous, while at the same time it privileges the collective engagements of established residents over those whose presence may be more fleeting or less definite. In order to demonstrate the inadequacies of such an approach, the article shows how minor acts of citizenship that are mobilised by City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens enact a mobile form of solidarity based on participation through presence. This, the article argues, potentially serves as the grounds for a critical alternative to an approach that assumes that intensified movements and diversities induce hostility.
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