Organizers: Jacopo Anderlini (University of Genoa, jacopo.anderlini@edu.unige.it)and Silvan Pollozek (Technical University of Munich, silvan.pollozek@tum.de)
Abstract
The goal of this session is to examine the material and socio-technical dimensions of the European border regime and its transformations. Far from the idea of uninterrupted lines that divide sovereign political entities typical of the Westphalian model (Zaiotti 2011, 46), we understand borders as complex and dispersed socio-technical assemblages enacted and (de)stabilized by the interplay of multiple actors, technologies and infrastructures. The session explores mundane modes of European migration and border control and seeks to shed light on both the material manifestations of border assemblages andon their contingent, preliminary and sometimes even ‘experimental’ character with all their frictions, contestations and work-arounds. How are mundane socio-technical border assemblages, such as the EURODAC system, the so-called Hotspots or Frontex readmission operations brought into being and stabilized (Callon 1984)? In which ways and forms do they proliferate? And how do contestations, objections or controversies affect their shape?
This session invites contributions that critically analyse past, present and transforming manifestations of European border assemblages. We encourage research papers that focus on genealogies of mundane European border assemblages and their socio-technical set-ups, that address recent developments and are based on qualitative fieldwork on European borderlands, border control measures and initiatives and their administrative ecologies, or that critically discuss how such mundane border assemblages affect and generate (new) issues of sovereignty, citizenship and mobility.
Topics / keywords
European border regime; socio-technical assemblage; materiality; mundane forms of governing; de/stabilization; transformation; contestation of migration and border control