Towards a theory of the discordant border

Walker, Margath A.; Winton, Ailsa

doi:10.1111/sjtg.12192

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 45 publications

(43 reference statements)

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“…However, security in the context of borders is narrowly construed as securitization. Such a move pulls the issue away from the public sphere and into the realm of national security, at the expense of a broad-based human security (Walker and Winton, 2017). The latter would recognize the "discordant" nature of borders along with the diverse and simultaneous mobilities necessary to a security not reduced to a militarized conception of borders founded on logics of threat.…”

Section: The Production Of the #Migrantcaravanmentioning

confidence: 99%

The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology

Walker

Boamah²

2020

Big Data & Society

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The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or “digital life” of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter’s networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally spatial technology. Rather than reflect, refract or distort, Twitter produces and (its power) is in turn produced through spatial mechanisms. We present multiple cartographic visualizations in support of this claim and highlight the ways in which a contextual knowledge of the subject under study—the migrant caravan—can further inform analyses of Big Data.

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Section: The Production Of the #Migrantcaravanmentioning

confidence: 99%

The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology

Walker

Boamah²

2020

Big Data & Society

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“…In their work on clandestine migrant journeys, Mainwaring and Brigden (2016, pp.251-252) refer to migration corridors as transnational social fields to capture 'the geography of origin, transit, detention, deportation and destination'. 3 Walker and Winton (2017) similarly argue for the importance of working through the scalar complexity of a given border. 4…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Borders for profit: transnational social exclusion and the production of the NAFTA border

Gingrich

Young

2019

IJMBS

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The focus of this paper is the production of the 'North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)' border that defines a trans/national social field and directs the day-to-day lives of migrant women who organise their livelihoods around the Mexico-Guatemala border. We document and investigate emerging transnational spaces and practices of social exclusion and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) that boost domestic economic interests, externalise social responsibility, privatise social risk, and reinforce national boundaries. We argue that policies and practices in this transnational social field are directed by market logic and that, accordingly, trade agreements and migration management regimes organise place and space to make the most of global inequalities through the simultaneous facilitation and restriction of mobility. Crucially, the coordinated ambivalent control of borders in this transnational marketised social field produces an entrepreneurial context that makes possible a range of profits through the selective symbolic dispossession of nation-states, nationalities, and migrant bodies: economic, political, and social.

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“…Others have argued for fortification as the re-inscription of state power (Butler, 2006;Jones and Johnson, 2016;Murphy, 2013;Nevins, 2010). Whether conceived as sites of securitization or as mobile spaces of encounter (or both) (Walker and Winton, 2017), bordering occurs amidst and in fact, enacts contradictory juxtapositions of flows and orderings within and beyond the state. Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) go a bit further to discuss how the border is a methodological tool, a way of thinking allowing us to grasp the struggle between heterogeneous mobilities and changing economic processes.…”

Section: Border Fortification Logicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The other U.S. Border? Techno-cultural-rationalities and fortification in Southern Mexico

Walker

2018

Environ Plan A

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This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and “technified” along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico’s Southern Border Program ( Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy’s goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two inter-related arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.

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Towards a theory of the discordant border

Cited by 9 publications

References 45 publications

The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology

The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology

Borders for profit: transnational social exclusion and the production of the NAFTA border

The other U.S. Border? Techno-cultural-rationalities and fortification in Southern Mexico

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