Beyond citizenship: the material politics of alternative infrastructures

Abstract

This paper argues for a line of inquiry in the intersection between migration studies and STS work around the notion of material politics in alternative spaces. Drawing on multisited ethnographic inputs, I describe arrangements of cooperation coexisting with post-conflict reparation in Colombia and governmental humanitarianism in Greece. I follow material practices transforming objects into arrangements of remembrance and collective support and address the orders enacted by these practices as alternative infrastructures challenging infrastructures of migration control. The notion of alternative infrastructures offers the possibility to epistemically explore an overlooked angle by citizenship studies and STS; it engages with the objects and relations embedded in the materiality of everyday life and its politics beyond the boundaries of instituted forms of citizenship.

A boat’s afterlife: multiple translations of migratory debris

“…Scholarly focus has extensively covered infrastructure which allows movement (Walters, 2015; Walters et al, 2022), shapes it in the form of ecological or man-made barriers (or both) (Dickson, 2021; Heller et al, 2017; Pallister-Wilkins, 2022; Squire, 2015) or finally seeks to control it (Glouftsios and Scheel, 2021; Pollozek and Passoth, 2019). Other strands of literature have also highlighted how lives lived in movement rely on informal, alternative infrastructures (Mora-Gámez, 2020; Trimikliniotis et al, 2016), and how the same technologies and materials used against the movement of people can also be used to support it (Heller et al, 2017; Noori, 2020).…”

“…Other types of objects and materials, for instance, might lend themselves to different interpretations and give rise to debates where mobile people themselves are directly involved in shifting their frames. This is the case for personal belongings which have been lost in detention and sought again (To Whom It May Concern, 2013) or which are being transformed through the work of migrants and refugees themselves creating new social infrastructures and places to digest past trauma (Mora-Gámez, 2020).…”

“…Such debris is understood as both waste littering public spaces and materials rife for re-use and re-purposing (Wagner Tsoni, 2020). Many initiatives seek to give these materials new life by converting them into other objects (Mora-Gámez, 2020), into souvenirs for tourists and objects of worship (Kushner, 2016), or even into displays in museums and art exhibitions (Gatta, 2016;Zucconi, 2019).…”

Scripts of Alterity: Mapping Assumptions and Limitations of the Border Security Apparatus through Classification Schemas

“…In the field of migration management and cross-border mobility, resistance, frictions, and struggles are constitutive elements of bordering (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Resistance is said to take multiple forms as appropriation, subversion, recalcitrance, and insubordination (Dijstelbloem et al 2017;Scheel 2017;Mora-Gámez 2020;Schinkel 2020), but it always entails some intentionality. With the concept of "de-inscription," we instead borrow from script theory the possibility that resistance is not necessarily intentional.…”